Diversity of Democracy

The Diversity of Democracy
The Diversity of
Democracy
Corporatism, Social Order and
Political Conflict
Edited by
Colin Crouch
Chair, Institute of Governance and Public Management,
University of Warwick, UK
and
Wolfgang Streeck
Director, Max-Planck-Institut fr Gesellschaftsforschung,
Germany
Edward Elgar
Cheltenham, UK Northampton, MA, USA
Colin Crouch and Wolfgang Streeck 2006

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A catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
The diversity of democracy : corporatism, social order and political conflict / edited
by Colin Crouch, Wolfgang Streeck.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Corporate state. 2. Social conflict. 3. Democracy. I. Crouch, Colin, 1944
II. Streeck, Wolfgang, 1946
JC478.D58 2006
321.8dc22
2006002661
ISBN-13: 978 1 84542 613 2 (hardcover)

ISBN-10: 1 84542 613 4 (hardcover)
Typeset by Cambrian Typesetters, Camberley, Surrey
Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall
Contents
List of tables and figures
Contributors
Preface
Colin Crouch and Wolfgang Streeck
vii
viii
xiii
PART I CORPORATISM AND DEMOCRACY

1
2
3
The study of organized interests: before The Century and after

Wolfgang Streeck
Neo-corporatism and democracy
Colin Crouch
From corporatist unions to protest unions? On the (difficult)
relations between organized labour and new social movements
Donatella della Porta
3
46
71
PART II DEMOCRATIC TRANSITIONS AND CONSOLIDATION

4
From democracy to democratization: before and after

Transitions from Authoritarian Rule
Terry Karl
5 Democratization and the popular interest regime in Latin America
Ruth Berins Collier
6 Making capitalism compatible with democracy: tentative
reflections from the East
Lszl Bruszt
99
119
149
PART III DEMOCRACY AND EUROPEAN INTEGRATION

7
The problem of legitimacy in the European polity: is

democratization the answer?
Claus Offe and Ulrich K. Preuss
The neo-functionalists were (almost) right: politicization and
European integration
Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks
v
175
205
vi
Contents
Collective participation in the European Union: the Euro

corporatism debate
Gerda Falkner
Postscriptum: Working with Philippe
Guillermo ODonnell
Index
223
243
249
List of tables and figures

TABLES
3.1
3.2
3.3
5.1
8.1
8.2
9.1
Present and past participation of ESF activists (% yes)

Forms of political participation of ESF activists (% yes)
Trust of ESF activists in various institutions (% who have
much or some trust)
Organizational differences and implications for collective
action
Left/right positioning and position on economic EU policies
(correlations)
Gal/Tan positioning and position on institutional EU policies
(correlations)
Genealogy of corporatisms in Europe
84
86
88
131
210
213
227
FIGURES
6.1
9.1
9.2
Transitions: democratization and economic transformation

Dimensions and levels of corporatism found in the literature
Policy network ideal types
vii
166
225
228
Contributors
Lszl Bruszt is professor at the Department of Social and Political Sciences
at the European University Institute, Florence. From 1992 to 2004 he taught at
the Central European University in Budapest. In his earlier research he dealt
with issues of institutional transformation in the post-communist countries. His
more recent studies focus on the interplay between transnationalization, institutional development and economic change. His book co-authored with David
Stark, Pathways from State Socialism (1998), deals with the dynamics of the
parallel extension of political rights and property rights in Central Europe. His
recent publications include Making Markets and Eastern Enlargement:
Diverging Convergence? (West European Politics 2002/2), Market Making as
State Making: Constitutions and Economic Development in Post-communist
Eastern Europe (Constitutional Political Economy 2002/1), and Who Counts?
Supranational Norms and Societal Needs (with David Stark, East European
Politics and Societies 2003/1).
Ruth Berins Collier is Professor of Political Science at the University of
California, Berkeley. Much of her work has focused on the relation between
trajectories of political regime change and popular political participation. She
has pursued this theme by examining popular electoral participation in the
process of democratization and the impact of how unions historically were
legalized. Her research has focused on diverse empirical settings, from Africa
and Latin America to Europe. Her major publications include Regimes in
Tropical Africa: Changing Forms of Supremacy, 19451975 (1982), Shaping
the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime
Dynamics in Latin America (co-authored, 1991), The Contradictory Alliance:
StateLabor Relations and Regime Change in Mexico (1992), and Paths
toward Democracy: The Working Class and Elites in Western Europe and
South America (1999). She has been editor of Studies in Comparative
International Development.
Colin Crouch is Chair of the Institute of Governance and Public Management
at the Business School of Warwick University. He is also an External
Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in
Cologne. He was Professor of Sociology at the European University Institute,
Florence, taught sociology at the LSE, and was a fellow and tutor in politics
viii
Contributors
ix
at Trinity College, Oxford, and Professor of Sociology at the University of

Oxford. He is chairman and former joint editor of The Political Quarterly, and
immediate past-president of the Society for the Advancement of Socioeconomics (SASE). He has published within the fields of comparative
European sociology and industrial relations, on economic sociology and on
contemporary issues in British and European politics. He is currently studying
processes of institutional innovation in the economy and in public policy. His
most recent books include Political Economy of Modern Capitalism: The
Future of Capitalist Diversity (co-edited with Wolfgang Streeck; 1997), Are
Skills the Answer? (with David Finegold and Mari Sako, 1999), Social Change
in Western Europe (1999), Local Production Systems in Europe: Rise or
Demise (co-authored; 2001), Postdemocracy (2004) and Changing
Governance of Local Economies: Response of European Local Production
Systems (co-authored; 2004).
Donatella della Porta is Professor of Sociology at the Department of Political
and Social Sciences at the European University Institute, Florence. She is
currently on leave of absence from the University of Florence, where she was
Professor of Political Science, President of the corso di laurea in administrative sciences, and Director of the Department of Political Science and
Sociology. She directs the DEMOS project (Democracy in Europe and the
Mobilization of Society) and has coordinated the Gruppo di Ricerca
sullAzione Collettiva in Europa (GRACE). Her main research interests are
social movements, political violence, terrorism, corruption, the police and
policies of public order. Among other things, she has directed a comparative
research project on the control of public mass demonstrations in Europe. Her
recent publications on social movements include Movimenti senza protesta?
(with Mario Diani; 2004), Transnational Protest and Global Activism (with
Sidney Tarrow, 2004), Polizia e protesta (with Herbert Reiter; 2004), I new
global (2003); Global, new global: Soziale Bewegungen und Globalisierung
(co-authored, 2003); Social Movement in a Globalizing World (co-authored,
1999), Social Movements: An Introduction (1999), and Policing Protest: The
Control of Mass Demonstration in Western Democracies (co-authored, 1998).
Gerda Falkner is Head of the Department of Political Science at the Institute
for Advanced Studies (IHS), Vienna. From 1999 to 2003 she directed a
research group at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne.
Since 1998 she has been an Associate Professor for Political Science at the
University of Vienna (where she is currently on leave). Her book publications
include Complying with Europe? (co-authored, 2005) and EU Social Policy in
the 1990s: Towards a Corporatist Policy Community (1998). She has
published in the European Journal of Industrial Relations, Journal of
Contributors
European Public Policy, Journal of Common Market Studies, and West

European Politics. She is also Vice-President of the Austrian European Union
Studies Association and co-editor of the European Integration Online Papers.
Liesbet Hooghe is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University
of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Research Professor at the Free University
of Amsterdam. She has been a Humboldt Fellow at the Wissenschaftszentrum
Berlin fr Sozialforschung, a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University
Institute, Florence, and a Fulbright Fellow at Cornell University. She is
currently Chair of the Organized Section on European Politics and Society of
the American Political Science Foundation. Her recent books include The
European Commission and the Integration of Europe: Images of Governance
(2002), Multi-level Governance and European Integration (with Gary Marks,
2001), and Cohesion Policy and European Integration: Building Multi-level
Governance (1996).
Terry Karl is the Gildred Professor of Latin American Studies, Professor of
Political Science, and the William R. and Gretchen Kimball University Fellow
at Stanford University. She was previously a professor in the Department of
Government at Harvard University. She has published widely on comparative
politics and international relations, with special emphasis on the politics of oilexporting countries, democratization, contemporary Latin American politics,
and human rights. Her books and monographs include: The Paradox of Plenty:
Oil Booms and Petros-states (1998), Bottom of the Barrel: Africas Oil Boom
and the Poor (with Ian Gary, 2003), and The Limits of Competition (with the
Group of Lisbon, 1995). She has also published in edited books and journals,
including Foreign Affairs, Comparative Politics, International Social Science
Journal, World Policy Journal, Journal of Democracy, Latin American
Research Review, Journal of International Affairs, The British Journal of
Latin American Affairs, and Slavic Review. Karls research draws upon fieldwork conducted in Latin America (Venezuela, Mexico, Central America,
Cuba, Chile), Africa (South Africa, Chad, Cameroon, the Republic of Congo,
the Democratic Republic of Congo) and Eastern Europe.
Gary Marks is Burton Craige Professor of Political Science at the University
of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Research Professor at the Free University
of Amsterdam. He is Director of the UNC Center for European Studies and has
served as Chair of the European Community Studies Association. His teaching and research interests lie in the field of comparative politics. Recent books
include Multi-level Governance and European Integration (with Liesbet
Hooghe, 2001), It Didnt Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United
States (with Seymour Martin Lipset, 2000), Continuity and Change in
Contributors
xi
Contemporary Capitalism (co-edited with Herbert Kitschelt, Peter Lange and

John Stephens, 1999), and European Integration and Political Conflict (coedited with Marco Steenbergen, 2004).
Guillermo ODonnell is Helen Kellogg Professor of Government at the
University of Notre Dame, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences. In successive stages of his intellectual career he has focused on
bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes, on transitions from authoritarian rule and,
more recently, on democratic theory and aspects of the quality of new democracies. His major works include Modernization and BureaucraticAuthoritarianism: Studies in South American Politics (1979), and Transitions
from Authoritarian Rule (co-edited with Philippe Schmitter and Laurence
Whitehead; vol. 4 co-authored with Schmitter, 1986). Other, more recent coedited volumes include Issues in Democratic Consolidation (1992), The
(Un)rule of Law and the Underprivileged in Latin America (1999), and The
Quality of Democracy: Theory and Applications (2004).
Claus Offe is Professor of Political Science at Humboldt University, Berlin,
where he holds a chair of Political Sociology and Social Policy. His previous
positions include professorships at the Universities of Bielefeld and Bremen,
where he has served as Director of the Centre of Social Policy Research. His
fields of research are democratic theory, transition studies, EU integration, and
welfare state and labour market studies. He has published numerous articles
and book chapters in these fields, a selection of which are reprinted as
Herausforderungen der Demokratie: Zur Integrations- und Leistungsfhigkeit
politischer Institutionen (2003). Recent book publications in English include
Varieties of Transition (1996), Modernity and the State: East and West (1996),
Institutional Design in Post-communist societies (with J. Elster and U. K.
Preuss, 1998), and the forthcoming (2005) English translation of
Selbstbetrachtung aus der Ferne: Tocqueville, Weber, und Adorno in Amerika
(2004).
Ulrich K. Preuss is Professor of Law and Politics at the Free University of
Berlin and Judge at the Constitutional Court of the Land of Bremen. He has
worked on the constitutional transition in the post-communist states of East
and Central Europe, the development of a European constitution, in particular
the concept of European citizenship, and the relations between liberal constitutionalism and the multicultural society. Among his recent works are
Constitutional Revolution: The Link between Constitutionalism and Progress
(1995), Institutional Design in Post-communist Societies: Rebuilding the Ship
at Sea (with Jon Elster and Claus Offe, 1998), and European Citizenship,
Multiculturalism and the State (as co-editor, 1998). His most recent book,
xii
Contributors
Krieg, Verbrechen, Blasphemie: ber den Wandel bewaffneter Gewalt (2002;

second edition 2003) deals with the legal and moral questions raised by the
terrorist attacks of September 11 and the role of the US in international politics.
Wolfgang Streeck is Professor of Sociology and Director at the Max Planck
Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne. From 1988 to 1995 he was
Professor of Sociology and Industrial Relations at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. He has written extensively on industrial relations and
comparative political economy and was President of the Society for the
Advancement of Socio-economics in 1998/99. His books include: Works
Councils: Consultation, Representation, Cooperation in Industrial Relations
(with Joel Rogers, 1995), Political Economy of Modern Capitalism: Mapping
Convergence and Diversity (with Colin Crouch, 1997), The Origins of
Nonliberal Capitalism: Germany and Japan (with Kozo Yamamura, 2001),
The End of Diversity? Prospects for German and Japanese Capitalism (with
Kozo Yamamura, 2002), Germany: Beyond the Stable State (with Herbert
Kitschelt, 2003), and Beyond Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced
Political Economies (with Kathleen Thelen, 2005).
Preface
In recent years there has been a remarkable growth in the number of nation
states that can reasonably be termed democratic (Schmitter and Schneider
2004). The fall of the Soviet empire not only made possible the emergence of
democratic forms of government among many (though not all) of its former
constituents, but also changed the approach of the US. When communistinspired movements were the main opposition to various anti-Communist
dictatorships around the world, the US often supported those dictatorships.
Lacking Soviet (and, for different reasons, Chinese) sustenance for opposition,
US foreign policy has at least tolerated (as in Latin America), and at best actually encouraged (Africa, Middle East, parts of Asia), democracy as a form of
government in the developing world as it did in Western Europe after the
Second World War. Around 200 of the worlds nation states now feature more
or less free and fair elections for their governments, with just under half of
these meeting tougher criteria for freedom and fairness. There is of course
serious debate over whether free elections are sufficient for calling a whole
polity, rather than just its formal electoral procedures, democratic. Elections
may be free, but most of a countrys privately owned mass media may be in
the hands of the supporters of one party. Or elected parliaments may be
dwarfed in influence over governments by powerful lobbies, including
inwardly investing multi-nationals. A cynic might argue that, if democracy is
spreading so well at the level of formal political institutions, then it is likely to
indicate that it is becoming less important for real power-broking. These are
all legitimate questions, which require substantial research to answer them.
What can certainly be agreed is that democracy is a diverse phenomenon, with
room for considerable argument over the relative qualities of its different
forms.
This is, of course, nothing new, and also serves as a word of strict caution:
the label democracy has long been bandied around at will. Democratic was
after all a favourite adjective of state socialist regimes. A naive nominalist
observing the two Germanies of the second half of the 20th century would
conclude that the difference between the German Democratic Republic and
the German Federal Republic was that the former was democratic and the
latter merely federal. To know what was really going on, one needed to understand the sub-text of the Leninist approach to democracy. Democracy
consisted in fulfilling the historical destiny of the proletariat, the great mass of
xiii
xiv
Preface
the people. This destiny could be objectively established on the basis of scientific studies and might well differ from the actual preferences of the contemporary proletariat, trapped as they were in the false consciousness imparted by
ruling classes. It was the role of communist parties to interpret the requirements of the historical destiny at any moment, and their power to do this had
to be protected even against the temporary wishes of the people. Once this
tortuous formula was accepted, the use of Soviet tanks to crush rebellion in
Budapest in 1956 could be justified as democratic.
Democratic diversity of this kind has almost departed from this world. Its
vulnerability to corruption is palpably obvious. But similar forms persist.
Marxist theory considered that eventually class would replace nation as the
mainspring of popular loyalty and identity. Ironically nationalist leaders today
often use a formula resembling the communist one to assert their unique
capacity to interpret the destiny of a nation, and therefore their right to unimpeded and unquestioned power. There are even some echoes of this in the
justification offered by the US and the UK for their military actions in the
Middle East, where some forms of Islam are claimed to be keeping populations in something resembling false consciousness. A further distortion of
democracy appears when elected leaders of established democracies use the
word to describe virtually everything they do. Because they owe their office to
democratic electoral procedure, they freely appropriate the adjective even for
decisions that have little or no popular support at all.
Once it ceased to be respectable for elites to debate in public whether
democracy is a good thing or not, it became necessary for everyone to appropriate the term, and then to disagree about its content. While Nazis and fascists
had spoken of democracy with contempt, the first revival of the far right in
post-war West Germany called itself the National Democratic Party. Academic
study of democracy can learn from this to use the term cautiously, aware of the
heterogeneity of its application and the strong and easy temptations that exist
for its misappropriation. The answer, however, cannot be to embark on a
search for its one true meaning. On the contrary, in spite of the many ideological or simply corrupt distortions of democracy from above, democratic theory
must admit of a diversity of forms that democracy might take, in particular and
precisely where it is not imposed from above but driven from below. While
relentlessly pointing out where democratic values are violated, democratic
theory must remain open to novelty, willing to expect a variety of phenomena,
and refrain from any dogmatic insistence on one best way if only to avoid
joining those who hold out their own way as the high road of democratic practice for the rest of the world to follow.
How better to endorse a non-dogmatic, empirically grounded, pluralistic
approach to democracy than by celebrating the work of Philippe Schmitter?
Democracy is and always was at the centre of Schmitters work, and in
Preface
xv
particular democracy in the making, the possibility of democracy in its real

diversity, and its imperfect forms as potential steps on a difficult way to something better. This is seen especially in Schmitters work on Latin America,
probably the field where his scholarship has had most practical effect.
Elsewhere in these pages Terry Karl and Guillermo ODonnell describe this
work and its impact on the sub-continent that was Schmitters first object of
study and, which is inseparable for him, of affection. If there is a cantus firmus
in Schmitters far-flung exploration of the subject of democracy, then it is that
not only can democracy be diverse, but, crucially for people struggling in nondemocratic polities, that there are many different routes to it no one best
way in two senses: neither in the practice of democracy nor in how to accomplish it.
Given the broad range and the multifaceted perspectives of Schmitters
contribution to the theory of democracy, no single book can do full justice to
it. So as editors we had to be selective and, like any selection, ours reflects the
preferences of those making the choice as much as it does the universe from
which the choice is made. This may account in part for why the first section
of the book takes up the connection between corporatism and democracy.
Schmitter originally encountered corporatism in Latin America, particularly in
Brazil and in Peronist Argentina. He was fully aware of its ambiguity,
precisely in its relationship to democracy which enabled him to make his
path-breaking contribution to the study of post-war democracy in Europe,
when that continent began to rival Latin America as Schmitters centre of
attention.
Hence, in Part I of the book, Wolfgang Streeck explores the trajectory of
neo-corporatism in post-war European nation states, from its success in
restraining the inflationary tendencies of a demand-managed economy with
unionized labour markets, to the current difficulties of welfare state reform in
post-industrial society. Colin Crouch and Donatella della Porta, in their
respective chapters, examine the implications in the same problematic early
21st century where Streecks account ends of neo-corporatist interest politics for the representation of relatively powerless social groups. Crouch starts
from the constructive contribution to democracy that he argues is made by
trade unions within non-authoritarian societal corporatism; he does not accept
the often posited contradiction between the two, but he does admit that maintaining his position might be difficult at the present time. Della Porta examines the new social movements that might be more realistically expressing the
discontent of todays marginalized groups, and their actual and potential relations to unions. This is very much a post-corporatist perspective; and it tackles a further potentially contentious interpretation of the democratic impulse.
As noted, Schmitters work started with Latin America, where he became
especially interested in diverse transitions to democracy. More recently, as
xvi
Preface
pro-democratic movements have gained momentum in various parts of the

world, Schmitter has adapted the approach developed in Latin America to
other regions: the former Soviet empire; Africa; certain parts of Asia. He has
also drawn attention to issues of consolidation and protection of democracy
once it has been achieved. Part II of the book, therefore, concentrates on
democratic transition and consolidation across a wide geographical range.
Terry Karl explores the theme in general, drawing particular attention to the
diversity of the routes to democracy. Lszl Bruszt considers experiences in
Central Europe, today one of the main regions for studying the growth of
democracy, and one inspiring well-founded optimism. Ruth Berins Collier
concentrates on Schmitters heartland, Latin America.
Struggles for democracy mostly take place in difficult, even dangerous,
contexts, and involve very weak institutions. While Schmitters work certainly
reflects this, it has also contributed to the study of democratization in the very
different situation of the European Union, culminating (to date) in a book with
the very Schmitteresque title: How to Democratize the European Union . . .
and Why Bother? (Schmitter 2000). Schmitters studies of the then European
Economic Community sprang from the insights of his teacher, the late Ernst
Haas, and the neo-functionalist approach Haas developed. Of course it is as
impossible to capture Schmitter within a single school as it is within a single
continent. We note in passing, however, that Haas, who had to emigrate from
Nazi Germany to the US, and Schmitter shared a strong commitment to
another fundamental value in addition to democracy, which is international
peace. Haas neo-functionalism and his, as well as Schmitters, interest in
European integration had been originally driven by the question, seen by many
as central in the 1950s and 1960s, of how to ensure that Europe would never
again lapse into fratricidal warfare, within nation-states as well as between
them. Domestic and international peace, the former through democracy and
prosperity, the latter through international integration as well as national
democracy, were thus intimately linked in Schmitters early intellectual interests and continued to provide the normative foundation of his work until the
present day. In Part III of the book, which is devoted to the issue of democracy
within the European Union, Claus Offe and Ulrich Preuss explore the possibilities of further democratization; Gary Marks and Liesbet Hooghe trace the
development and the complexities of the neo-functionalist approach; and
Gerda Falkner, by considering the place of neo-corporatist structures within
the emerging EU polity, brings our survey full circle.
This book has two purposes: to explore the state of the debate over democracy and its diversity, and to celebrate the contribution of a major figure in
that debate. For the majority of the essays in the book the first theme had to
take pride of place: their focus is on the subject, not on the person. However,
given the vividness and vigour of Philippes personality, and the fact that it is
Preface
xvii
impossible to separate the man from the approach to social science that is
represented by his work, some more personal reflections on Philippe Schmitter
are in order. In his epilogue to the volume Schmitters long-time collaborator,
Guillermo ODonnell, provides exactly that.
Colin Crouch and Wolfgang Streeck
Coventry and Cologne
REFERENCES
Schmitter, Philippe C. (2000), How to Democratize the European Union . . . and Why
Bother? London: Rowman and Littlefield.
Schmitter, Philippe C. and Carsten Q. Schneider (2004), Liberalization, transition and
consolidation: measuring the components of democratization, Democratization, 11
(5) (special issue), 5990.
PART I
Corporatism and democracy
1. The study of organized interests:

before The Century and after
Wolfgang Streeck1
At some time in the 1960s a reaction began to develop among European social
scientists against what may be termed American normalism.2 By American
normalism I mean a more or less tacit assumption, shared by almost all of
American social science when it was about to achieve worldwide dominance,
to the effect that advanced industrial societies were bound to converge on the
model of the most advanced industrial society, the USA. Paradigmatic of this
was a stream of literature that attributed increasing similarities between
modern societies, observed or expected, to common needs to find rational
solutions to identical functional problems posed by the continuing process of
industrialization. Perhaps its most prominent example was the book by Kerr,
Dunlop, Harbison and Meyers, Industrialism and Industrial Man (Kerr et al.
1960). Essentially it argued that modern societies, including their politics,
were shaped by technological imperatives that left little or no choice with
respect to alternative modes of social organization or, indeed, ways of life. In
fact, faced with the overwhelming dictates imposed by the unrelenting
progress of technology and industry, politics had mutated into rational adjustment of social practices and institutions to indisputable universal constraints,
dealing with which was best left to technocratic experts trained in the parsimonious pursuit of functionalist best practice.
A core implication of the convergence theories of the 1960s was that the
advance of industrial society was tantamount to, in the words of another
famous social science book of the time, an end of ideology (Bell 1965). Not
without a sense of irony Kerr and his co-authors, and writers like W. W.
Rostow (1990), continued to draw upon the technological determinism evident
in some of Karl Marxs writings to justify their confident prediction that even
the countries of the Soviet bloc would sooner rather than later have to
converge on the pluralist industrialism that reigned in the West, ending once
and for all the ideological confrontation between capitalism and socialism, not
just in the international system, but also in the domestic societies of post-war
liberal democracy.3 In the end politics, just as Marx had predicted, would
cease to be the exercise of authority in the interest of a ruling class and turn
3
into rational administration of production, although, to be sure, under capitalist rather than communist auspices.
Incipient European rejection of American normalism in the 1960s clearly
had to do with the war in Vietnam and the domestic upheavals in the USA that
accompanied it, which cast growing doubt on the promise of American
convergence theorists of a world forever pacified by economic growth,
Keynesian demand management and the logic of industrialism. Such doubts
were felt especially by a new generation of European social scientists who,
unlike their teachers, had not received their formative impressions in the
immediate post-war years, with the stark contemporary contrast between
European moral and physical devastation and American confidence and prosperity. In any case, the declining credibility of the USA as a general model of
modern society set in motion a number of intellectual developments in
European social science that are difficult to disentangle and whose precise
relations with one another cannot possibly be investigated here. As always in
the social sciences, analytical and normative concerns were closely interwoven. Those European social scientists to whom America was no longer the
unquestioned destiny of historical progress began to develop, often reluctantly,
an interest in the peculiarities of their own societies, which they were less and
less satisfied to regard as signs of social, economic or political backwardness.
To them, a conceptual language was bound to be wanting that made its users
treat what distinguished European countries from the USA as transient conditions about to give way to imminent Americanization. One result was growing
analytical discontent with the convergence theory of the time, often expressed
in increasingly critical discussions of the core concept of contemporary
macrosociology, modernization.
Rising European critique of modernization theory, in turn, became linked
to a sceptical revision of the technocratic concept of politics as projected by
American theories of an end of ideology. If there were non-American traits
of European societies that were worth preserving, it was necessary to specify
the forces capable of making modern societies differ regardless of the fact that
they were all industrial societies. History clearly mattered, but as such it
seemed hardly enough to withstand functionalist or, for that matter, imperialist convergence pressures. It also lacked any activist connotations and was
almost by definition not subject to choice or volition. The answer that
suggested itself was that it was above all by means of politics that societies,
factually or at least potentially, established and defended their distinct identities and exercised collective choices between alternative forms of social organization. That bill, however, was not filled by the functionalist-technocratic
version of politics inherent in American normalism and, in particular, the
theory of pluralist industrialism. As a result, European social scientists found
themselves increasingly groping for a concept of collective political action
The study of organized interests: before the century and after
that restored agency to societies, allowed for continuing ideological conflict

between alternative political projects and ways of social life, and restored to
systematic prominence irrational struggles about power and wealth, as well
as elusive intangibles like collective identifications and collective dignity.4
Declining European faith in American normalism coincided with the worker
and student uprisings in Europe during the late 1960s, and with growing trade
union power in subsequent years. For many and perhaps most of the younger
European social scientists of this period, this had two important consequences.
First, it suggested defining the differentia specifica of their societies (the structural properties that made them different, and perhaps permanently different,
from the USA) in terms of the institutionalized inclusion of organized labour as
a major societal actor in their political systems.5 Second, the sort of politics that
was believed to make a difference for the social organization of modern society became identified, in one form or other, with class politics: with the way
unions and their main allies, leftist political parties, were positioned in the societal power structure vis--vis the state on the one hand and their natural adversary, capital, on the other. It was in the interaction between these three
collective actors, it appeared, that the fundamental choices on the organization
of social life were made that were at the bottom of difference and diversity
within industrial capitalism and that were ideologically hidden by received
theories of convergence and a supposed end of ideology.
Not that trade unions and even class conflict were absent from mainstream
American social science of the 1960s. In fact, an entire discipline was devoted
to the subject, industrial relations, which had incidentally developed quite
sophisticated conceptual and empirical tools for cross-national comparison. Its
leading figures, however, were none other than Clark Kerr and, above all, John
Dunlop, co-authors and highly visible public proponents of the theory of
convergent industrialism. To them and their disciples, the study of industrial
relations was embedded in a grand narrative of the national and international
progress of collective bargaining, that is, the backbone institution of labour
relations reform under the American New Deal that had so convincingly
demonstrated its capacity to transform disruptive class conflict into peaceful
class collaboration in pursuit of economic efficiency. Much of the industrial
relations literature appeared interesting and instructive to many of the
Europeans who in the 1960s began to study the relations between trade unions,
capital and the state. However, most of them were also taken aback by the
apparent pragmatism of an academic discipline that seemed to have found its
ultimate raison dtre in the production of recipes for the depoliticized expert
administration of what seemed to be a central arena of struggle for economic
and political power; a struggle on whose uncertain outcome appeared to hinge
fundamental societal choices between alternative ways of organizing work and
life in modern society.
To many of its critics, the discipline of industrial relations as it had developed in the USA suffered,6 not only from excessive pragmatism, but also from
its congenital association with Parsonian structural functionalism, a theory
increasingly deemed unsuitable for understanding conflict, change and historical agency. Perhaps in pursuit of academic respectability, John Dunlop in his
foundational treatise on what he called the industrial relations system
(Dunlop 1958 [1993]) had conceptualized his object of study as a subsystem
of modern society comparable to the economy and the polity and specializing
in industrial rule-making. By explicitly deriving his core concepts from the
work of his Harvard colleague Talcott Parsons, Dunlop bestowed on the new
discipline a conservative image that he may have found helpful in the academic battles of the 1950s and early 1960s in the USA. To Europeans, however,
who were seeking to equip themselves to explore what they perceived as an
imminent repoliticization of institutionalized labour relations, this was bound
to be less than attractive.
With hindsight it seems strange that American students of industrial relations never made contact with an important non-functionalist American social
science tradition, comparative politics. Like industrial relations, it was prominently concerned with trade unions, although mostly as political rather than
economic actors.7 As represented by the work of scholars like Reinhard
Bendix and Seymour Martin Lipset,8 comparative politics was an ambitious
attempt, located at the intersection between political science and sociology, to
uncover the social forces behind different paths of nation-building and state
formation in Western societies. Investigating in particular the origin of democratic government in its interaction with classes, parties and organized interests, scholars tried to account for the differences and similarities between
Western post-war democracies by combining political theory, history and
comparative empirical macrosociology. The work that resulted attained a level
of sophistication and a historical depth unmatched since Max Weber had written about a very different world more than half a century and two world wars
away. Still, just as it was largely overlooked by the American institutional
economists who had founded the discipline of industrial relations, the
Europeans beginning to dissociate themselves from American normalism were
also slow to discover its potential significance for their project. One reason
seems to have been the emerging association (however loose) of much of
European social science at the time with traditional Marxist beliefs on the
overriding importance of class conflict for politics and society, which was
bound to alienate it from a school of thought that explicitly considered other
cleavages as equally important. Moreover, the apparent anti-communism,
and even anti-socialism, and the corresponding American triumphalism in
some of the writings of an author like Lipset did not endear American comparative politics to sympathizers of an emerging New Left, and it obviously
prevented them, at least for a time, from recognizing and appreciating the fact
that its approach squarely contradicted functionalist convergence theories.
ENTER NEO-CORPORATISM
Organized interests by no means constituted an unknown subject to standard
American political science in the 1960s. But neither was it an especially
prominent subject, nor was the way it was treated especially interesting.
Democracies differed from totalitarian dictatorships in that they conceded
their citizens freedom of association and collective petition, embodied in
constitutionally guaranteed rights to form special interest organizations so as
to exert pressure on the public and the government of the state. Such a concession, however, was considered to be not without risk. In a variety of ways,
organized special interests appeared capable of distorting the sovereign will of
the citizenry as expressed in free and general elections. Some interest groups
were better at organizing than others, and the most powerful might even penetrate the state, take possession of some of its branches and arrogate to themselves direct control over public policy. Still, suppressing organized interests
was out of the question in a free society. As a second-best solution, therefore,
it seemed preferable to have many of them, rather than just a few, so that they
balanced each other. Highly specialized, dispersed groups with narrow interests seemed more acceptable than broad and encompassing groups potentially
competing with the state for the definition of the common good. In any case,
interest groups had to be kept at arms length from the state, limiting them to
lobbying the state from the outside; their organization had to be strictly
voluntary, emerging exclusively out of civil society; and it was incumbent
upon the law to provide for the utmost transparency of transactions between
organized interests and the public powers. In brief, interest groups were
conceived in terms of a conceptual framework of pluralist democracy (Dahl
1969; Lindblom 1968) which was both descriptive and normative one might
say: more descriptive as far as the USA was concerned, and more normative
with respect to the rest of the world.
Creativity in scholarly pursuits is difficult to define, although one tends to
know it when one sees it. Among the few things one can say in the abstract is
that often creativity lies in abandoning a received conceptual framework and
redefining a presumably well-known subject of inquiry in terms that were
previously regarded, by all knowledgeable experts, as inapplicable to it. More
generally, creativity may consist in considering well-known and even apparently trivial empirical observations in a new substantive context, in which they
then turn out to allow for interesting answers to questions that had never
before been asked about them. Creativity is also implied in taking seriously
observations that before were treated as insignificant anomalies, or errors of

measurement, or simply transitory conditions, from which nothing could be
learned. Or, importantly, creativity may show in a lack of inhibition, which
sometimes may appear downright frivolous, in comparing or equating
phenomena that political (or theoretical) correctness decrees have nothing to
do with each other.
Still the Century of Corporatism, Schmitters famous essay that was first
published in 1974 (Schmitter 1974), was creative in all these respects and
perhaps in others as well.9 Its apparent subject was organized interest groups;
but very little reference was made to lobbying. Clearly in its background
was, not the USA, but the authors early research on Latin American authoritarianism and the role publicly organized social groups, or corporations,
played in it. However, although the essay was political science coming out of
a leading US research university, the strange arrangements it dealt with were
not conceived as an aberration from the American way of pluralist democracy
and modernity. Instead they were analysed, their dirty authoritarian connotations notwithstanding, in terms of a particular institutional form of a general
relationship, that between states and their societies, and indeed as devices
deployed by the latter in pursuit of their modernization. Moreover, authoritarian state corporatism was placed in the context of traditional European
patterns of statesociety relations and of the formation and institutionalization
of organized interests, essentially on the same plane as the respective
American patterns. (As a result, America appeared at least as exceptional as
European countries, or indeed even more so.) In fact, the core of the paper was
that it observed, and refused to deny, that some of the bona fide democracies
of Western Europe sustained institutional arrangements that were in far more
than superficial ways similar to those of Latin American or historical
European authoritarian regimes; the eye-opener here being, in Schmitters
own account, the Swiss milk marketing board (Schmitter 1996). And rather
than predicting or demanding the demise of such traits in the progress of
democracy, the paper outrageously suggested that they were, to the contrary,
not only compatible with liberal democracy, but actually performed important
positive functions for and within it.
With hindsight it is not difficult to understand why Schmitters article, in
which he predicted a long life and indeed a glorious future for corporatism,
should have had such an enormous impact on European social science in the
1970s.10 Mainstream American interest group theory at the time had little to
offer to Europeans, especially to the younger generation of social scientists
that had grown suspicious of American normalism. That the picture it drew of
the role of organized interests in politics and society did not fit the realities of
post-war Western European democracies was obvious; but the question
remained whether the problem was with the theory or the reality. Schmitter
settled that question by proposing an ambitious conceptual framework for the

study of interest groups that implicitly highlighted the narrowness and
parochialism of the pressure group and lobbying literature of the time.
Moreover, breaking away from the trodden path of modernization theory,
Schmitter suggested and legitimated a truly comparative perspective that
allowed for a variety of roads to and versions of democracy, some of them
quite compatible with the healthy survival of institutions that were declared
outdated by the reigning theories of the period. Not least, instead of explicit or
implicit prescription there was in Schmitters work a contagious and encouraging scientific curiosity for the complexity and variety of politics and societies outside the USA, combined with an unrelenting determination to take
realities seriously, no matter how different they might be from received
prescriptions.
Most important, however, among the reasons why Schmitters resurrection
of corporatism as a concept for social science resonated so strongly with
European social scientists (and, later, American Europeanists) was that it
linked the study of interest groups to fundamental issues concerning the constitution of states and societies, the role and the capacities of politics in society,
and the sources of social cohesion. Up to Still the Century, most research on
organized interests had confined itself to questions like which group was most
likely to get its will with respect to which decisions of government, or how
interest groups could best be domesticated to protect the democratic political
process from their distorting influence. Now, applying Schmitters categories,
the way societies dealt with organized groups (what activities of such groups
they tolerated or encouraged, or how they influenced their organizational structures) could be read as indicative of the character and historical origin of different types of national states and of how these undertook to govern their
societies. In this way, research on interest groups was made to speak to one of
the most important issues in the construction of political communities, namely
how national societies chose to accommodate the collectivism (the particularistic identities and the collective action capacities) of the social groups of
which they were composed. Structure and activities of organized interests, as
observed in contemporary democracies, were studied in the context of national
histories of state formation that included the medieval guilds and their transformations, the Stndestaat which at the time of Max Weber was still a
competitor to parliamentary democracy based on territorial representation, the
anarcho-syndicalist and Rte traditions of the European Left, and others. Thus
contemporary research on interest groups became connected to theoretical
traditions such as Durkheimian functionalism, Catholic social thought and
social democratic theories of group democracy, as well as (ex negativo) to
Rousseauian liberalism and the French Revolutions prohibition on intermediary organizations interposing themselves between the individual citizen and
10
the state. All of a sudden, a research field that to many had seemed hopelessly
empiricist and American-centred, began to open up exciting perspectives on
vast landscapes of democratic theory, political sociology and social theory in
general.11
Among the many intriguing phenomena highlighted by Schmitters
approach that struck a chord with Europeans was the ambiguous ideological
status of corporatist structures of interest organization and politics. Liberal
doctrine considered fundamentally undesirable any sort of collectivism below
the level of the national polity or, for that matter, the national economy. The
practical problem it faced, however, was that the societies of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries plainly resisted being reduced to assemblies of individuals, just as economies never quite matched the ideal prescriptions of atomistic competition. Early on, radical liberals in France and Britain had tried to
break the inherent collectivism of their societies, but had to learn that this
required an amount of state force that became increasingly hard to muster and
to legitimate as democratization progressed. This then raised the
Durkheimian question of whether and how social groups, if they could not
be eliminated, could at least be usefully transformed into intermediary associations, making them contribute to social integration in large societies with a
long distance between the individual and the state (Durkheim 1893 [1964]).
The Left, for its part, was from its beginnings closely associated with the
independent collective organization of social groups. Trade unions in particular claimed collective rights independent from and preceding the legal order of
the state, insisting on their foundational autonomy from bourgeois society
and demanding that it be legally and politically respected. Leftist democratic
theory therefore espoused collective as well as individual rights and demanded
opportunities for collective in addition to individual democratic participation.
Here the Left, often to its surprise and discomfort, met with some of its ideological opponents on the Right, from the Catholic Church to anti-liberal proponents of a Stndestaat, who also doubted the capacity of liberal individualism
to provide for the social integration of large and complex societies. The
concept of corporatism, as revived by Schmitter, highlighted this somewhat
embarrassing convergence. It also drew attention to the manifold possibilities
of compromise between different strands of opposition to liberalism, which
otherwise fought for quite incompatible interests and ideas, and it cast an interesting light on the frequent instances when structures of collective representation were converted from right to left purposes, and vice versa. Especially
Social Democrats and Christian Democrats in Europe seemed able to agree on
the desirability of institutionalizing organized social interests in the public
realm, and how to reconcile social collectivism with liberal democracy was a
matter of concern, not just for pragmatic liberals such as Durkheim, but also
for the reformist Left and the moderate Right. Indeed, as we will see, this was
11
precisely one of the big themes of European politics in the early 1970s, when
political stability seemed to depend on the establishment of social partnership between organized capital, organized labour and a democratic state in a
liberal democracy-cum-market economy.
That European societies combined functional and territorial representation,
and in ways that significantly differed from the lobbying model of the USA,
was not as such new. Indeed, it was one of the central insights of the comparative politics literature, especially the work of Stein Rokkan, who had gone as
far as to describe the complex systems of organized interests and intermediary
groups in some European societies as a second tier of government (Rokkan
1966). It was among Schmitters most significant achievements that with his
rediscovery of the concept of corporatism he helped Europeans intrigued by
the role of class in politics connect to this research tradition, which many of
them had viewed with suspicion because of its anti-Marxist orientation. In the
process, they also became aware of the historical-institutionalist method that
had been cultivated in comparative politics and that was to become centrally
important to the subsequent development of the study of political economy.
Moreover, and perhaps even more consequentially, it was through the concept
of corporatism that the discipline of industrial relations, especially comparative industrial relations, had a chance to avail itself of an intellectually
demanding conceptual framework that was not structural-functionalist and
that enabled it to dissociate itself from its narrowly pragmatic and even technocratic heritage. This, in turn, made the industrial relations literature more
attractive to European social scientists interested in basic questions of the
constitution of interests and the societies within which they emerge.
As Schmitters work appreciated the specificity of European, non-pluralist
patterns of interest politics it was able to serve as a conduit between the developing European-cum-New Left interest in industrial relations on the one hand
and authors such as Lipset and Bendix on the other. In the mid-1970s the study
of industrial relations became increasingly embedded in a comparative politics
approach that drew on the concept of corporatism for a broader view of trade
unionism and the collective action of social classes, one in which unions were
more than just agents of collective bargaining or, alternatively, organized political lobbying groups. First in Europe, but then also in the USA comparative
industrial relations developed a capacity to view its subject as part of a societys political system, rather than, like Dunlop, merely as a subsystem of the
economy confined to rule-making on the employment relationship. Later this
was to give rise to an interdisciplinary institutionalist perspective on political
economy that combined macrosociology, political science and, to some extent,
economics and became a major if not the dominant, and almost certainly the
most innovative, strand of development in the social sciences in the 1980s and
1990s.
12
Summing up, what made Schmitters early work so exciting, first to

Europeans and then also to Americans, was that it helped return to mainstream
social science the insight that modern polities and societies could, unlike the
USA, be constituted around organized classes and that they might deal with
class conflict in ways profoundly different from the USA but still compatible
with liberal democracy. In particular, democratic societies had the option of
taming class conflict by institutionalizing class relations in a second tier of
government composed of a system of intermediary organizations, in ways
inspired by corporatist traditions. Not only could such a system coexist with
parliamentary democracy, but where such coexistence was achieved, benefits
accrued to governability and economic performance that other, more liberal
systems seemed unable to generate. This topic will be discussed below in
greater detail.
THE CORPORATIST GROWTH INDUSTRY

OF THE 1970s
Du siehst mit diesem Trank im Leibe
Bald Helenen in jedem Weibe.
(Faust, Der Tragdie Erster Teil: Hexenkche)
The impact of conceptual innovations in the social sciences depends, much

more than is admitted by those who would like to believe in the cumulative
progress of our knowledge on social affairs, on the extent to which they
manage to give definition to emerging social and political problems that are
widely felt to exist but are as yet insufficiently understood. Typically, such
problems so occupy the attention and imagination of contemporaries that they
tend to be regarded as general problems of all societies, although with hindsight it often turns out that their predominance was conditional on a specific
historical context. If that context disappears, so do the problems, regardless of
whether they were ever actually resolved, and with the problems go the
concepts that gave expression to them and served for a while as organizing
ideas for reflections on society in general.
The concept of corporatism was rediscovered at a time when European
political economies were trying to come to terms with a sudden increase in the
power of trade unions. That increase had resulted from the explosion of labour
militancy at the end of the 1960s when governments still felt bound by the
political promise of full employment that was part of the second post-war
settlement.12 Keynesian demand management, however (the social technology
that was to enable governments to deliver on that promise) depended on trade
unions refraining from making use of the excessive bargaining power that
13
accrued to them from a type of political intervention in the economy which

insured them against the negative employment consequences of overshooting
wage settlements. Where unions, for whatever reason, refused to moderate the
wage demands of their members, the received political wisdom of the period
was that governments were forced to accommodate redistributive wage claims
by fiscal and monetary expansion, which was bound to give rise to inflation.
Like unemployment, this could not but damage their electoral prospects.
The core problem of public policy in the 1970s, therefore, seemed to be
how to make trade unions comply with wage guidelines stipulated by governments under pressure to provide both full employment and monetary stability.
Public discussion centred on the respective prospects and merits of statutory
versus voluntary incomes policies and on how best to centralize wage bargaining at national level in order to impose macroeconomic discipline on wage
formation. Given the new strength of the unions and the experience of union
members in the late 1960s revolting against all-too-moderate leaders, curtailing the autonomy of trade unions and their right to free collective bargaining
seemed as out of the question as disciplining unions by permitting unemployment to rise. With everyone searching for a formula for how to procure
economic stability and, indeed, social order in the face of an increasingly
demanding society, within which especially the working class was aggressively using its democratic freedom of association, the idea of a new corporatism, one that combined public concertation of private organized groups
with liberal democracy and democratic autonomy of civil society from the
state, could not but appear extremely attractive to a wide variety of audiences.
Early on, then, Schmitters conceptual construct of neo-corporatism
became identified with a societal configuration that provided for an institutionalized role for trade unions (and by necessity for their counterparts in wage
bargaining, employers and their associations) in government economic policymaking. Within that configuration, privileged access to public policy of the
organized core interests of the capitalist political economy was conditional on
moderation of the organized pursuit of particularistic interests, especially in
wage setting. Such moderation was to bring collective bargaining in line with
government economic policies which, however, were made no longer unilaterally but in consultation with the two sides of industry. Thus sovereignty was
shared (the sovereignty of the state with that of organized social groups, and
that of organized social groups with that of the state) to be exercised jointly,
with better results for the common interest of all. The exact details were likely
to differ between countries, and exploring such differences (in legal institutions, organizational structures and the subjects of political exchange
between the neo-corporatist trinity of state, capital and labour) became the
substance of what came to be known in political science and political sociology as the corporatist debate of the 1970s.
14
In its course neo-corporatism was discovered just about everywhere, and

seemed conspicuous for its absence where it was not, like in the USA, or
where, like in Britain, there was a series of failed attempts to put it in place.
Elements of neo-corporatist institutionalization of class interests, centralization of trade unions and collective bargaining, and economic policy concertation between the government, business and labour were found even in
countries as improbable as Iceland. It was almost as if a competition had
started between researchers of different national origin, each eager to demonstrate that they, too, were able to detect corporatist arrangements at home and
thereby elevate their countries to membership of what was sometimes referred
to as a corporatist international.13 Indeed, very soon the concept became
employed by international organizations such as the OECD, which for a while
seemed about to consider neo-corporatism as a new magic formula for the
management of the increasingly unruly capitalist political economies of
Western Europe.
If the corporatist debate of the 1970s was at all contentious, it was on the
question of whether it was good or bad for trade unions to participate in tripartite economic concertation. For some, mostly on the radical Left, corporatism,
neo or not, was an instrument of the capitalist state to domesticate a potentially revolutionary trade union movement (Panitch 1979). Concepts first
developed by Robert Michels (1911 and 1925 [1989]) in his classic investigation of the Social Democratic Party of Germany before the First World War
were employed to construct a narrative of a small oligarchy of trade union officials who had taken away control of their organizations from the rank-and-file
to betray their trust and allow themselves to be co-opted into class collaboration by employers and the state, especially under social democratic governments (Hyman 1975).14 But where they saw treason, others saw strategy, and
rather than as class collaboration they regarded neo-corporatism as class
compromise by which organized labour extended its political and economic
reach into areas where it would otherwise have had no influence at all. To
social democrats in particular, just as, under different auspices, to business and
its conservative allies, corporatist cooperation enabled organized labour to
extract long-term benefits for short-term concessions, exchanging illusory
gains like nominal wage increases for real gains in economic growth, social
policy and, importantly, organizational strength and stability (Pizzorno 1978).
Whether participation in neo-corporatist arrangements empowered or, to
the contrary, disinherited labour soon became the subject of intensive comparative research, based on the steadily improving national account statistics
published by the OECD and utilizing the rapidly increasing power of mainframe and, later, desktop computers and of program packages such as SPSS.
During the 1980s quantitative comparison, mostly by means of regression
analysis, widely available and easy to perform as it had become, turned into
15
something like the standard method of advanced research in political science

and macrosociology. Quantitative indicators were developed to measure a
countrys degree of corporatism, invariably based on or proceeding from
Schmitters now famous definitions in his 1974 article, to serve as the central
independent variable. Among the dependent variables were a countrys level
of real wages, its degree of wage dispersion, its spending on social security,
especially on benefits regarded as de-commodifying, its level of unemployment and the like, as measured by national macroeconomic and political statistics.15 Mostly such analyses seemed to show that workers were on the whole
better off in countries with more rather than less corporatism, that is, where
their organizations had agreed to act responsibly, mediating in neo-corporatist fashion between the demands of their members and the needs of the
national economy (Castles 1987).
Treason, in other words, seemed to pay, not just for the traitors but also for
the betrayed. This, of course, was less than convincing to those who were still
hoping for the worker unrest of the late 1960s and early 1970s to evolve into
a truly anti-capitalist revolution. Their numbers, however, dwindled with time,
and the attraction of autonomous shopfloor militancy declined together with
the fortunes of the British trade union movement later in the decade. Korpis
(1978) work on the democratic class struggle did its share to dampen the
enthusiasm of those who would have liked to believe in direct action, and the
same can be said of Pizzornos (1978) seminal essay on political exchange,
although it did preserve, in its notion of unions trading in collective identity
for material benefits, a melancholic memory of some of the hopes of the Left
at the beginning of the decade.
A second theme of the corporatist debate was the contribution of neocorporatism to the success of national incomes policies and, in particular, the
containment of inflation within a, potentially inflationary, Keynesian political
economy. The dependent variable here was not the material position of the
working class, but national economic performance measured in terms of the
rate of inflation and, as the decade progressed, unemployment (and later by the
so-called misery index (Okun 1962) that combined the two, on the assumption that they could be traded off against one another).16 It was at this point
that the political scientists and sociologists who were studying the consequences of neo-corporatist interest representation came closest to the concerns
of many leading macroeconomists of the period. Indeed, there was a time
when some of the latter used indicators of neo-corporatism, as developed by
Schmitter and, notably, Crouch (1985), in models estimating the causes of
inflation and monetary stability (for example, Bruno and Sachs 1985). This
ended at the latest when macroeconomics and Thatcherist politics rediscovered the possibility and indeed feasibility of containing inflation by letting
unemployment rise. Still, the exploration by a broad stream of political science
16
and political sociology of the role of neo-corporatism in successful national

incomes policies became one of the origins of what later developed into a
historical-institutionalist approach to political economy (Trigilia 1998), one
that took economic institutions seriously while studying them from an empirical rather than an efficiency-theoretical perspective. Clearly this could have
been extended further towards a self-conscious revival of institutional
economics in the tradition of the Historische Schule before 1933. Why this did
not happen is a question worth asking. A contributing factor must have been
the victory, discussed further below, of neo-classical theory and, even more,
neo-liberal practice during the 1980s, which deprived sociology and political
science of indispensable interdisciplinary support; not to mention the advance
of rational choice in the social sciences themselves that for a time put any
kind of macrosociology and historical-institutional analysis on the defensive.
It was in the analysis of the impact of neo-corporatist institutions on
macroeconomic performance that the corporatist debate of the 1970s came
closest to issuing in something like corporatist theory; that is, in the formulation of generalized ifthen relationships between specific causes and
effects. Undoubtedly a major reason for the boom in research on neo-corporatism in the 1970s was the intuition that it would furnish proof of the
economic and perhaps social superiority of countries with neo-corporatist
institutions. Where class relations were organized on a neo-corporatist
pattern, making them conducive to political concertation and exchange,
economies and societies were widely felt to be better off than where, as in the
USA and the UK, relations between the classes and between state and society
followed a more pluralist (that is, more adversarial and less accommodationist) pattern. Where societies suffered from low growth, inflation, low productivity and, as a consequence, social disorder, this was because their
political-economic institutions did not provide for peaceful class compromise, cooperation and, above all, inclusion of organized labour in national
policy-making.17 If Britain, torn by industrial strife, was the negative example, Model Germany, inexorably rising to economic predominance in
Europe and perhaps beyond, seemed to suggest that neo-corporatism might
turn out to be the new, presumably universal formula for social peace and
economic prosperity under democratic capitalism.
An interesting question, of course, concerned the practical consequences if
the corporatist theory that seemed to be forming were indeed true. For a
while, neo-corporatists, among them quite a few from Britain, more or less
explicitly advised British policy-makers that they had to get a more neo-corporatist industrial relations system (and generally more neo-corporatist structures
mediating between state and society) if they wanted their industry and, by
extension, their country to be governable and prosperous again. In fact, moves
in this direction had been under way in British politics since the mid-1960s,
17
but had always got stuck due to resistance from all quarters of society, including the trade unions and their increasingly militant shopfloor representatives.
If corporatism, however, was indeed the key to governability and economic
success one could still hope for some sort of convergence on a neo-corporatist
pattern of social organization and policy-making, driven by the causal relationships stipulated by corporatist theory, as well as by the developing
insights, slow as they might be in coming, of ultimately rational politicians,
trade union leaders and citizens. Such hopes continued well into the 1980s and
1990s, and there were phases in the corporatist debate when corporatist
theory seemed to turn into a sort of corporatist convergence theory, in a
strange way resembling the theory of pluralist industrialism that, to the
enchantment of many Europeans, had so effectively been discredited by the
discovery of neo-corporatism.18 In a milder form, the new belief in, now
corporatist, convergence suggested that countries which, for whatever reason,
failed to follow the neo-corporatist recipe (too much internal resistance or too
little political will, or intelligence) were condemned to a permanently higher
level of social disorder and had to pay for their structural disability or their
unwise preferences with continuing losses in economic well-being.19
In fact, however, while there may have been a corporatist debate, there
never was a corporatist theory, perhaps because social and political reality
changed too fast in the 1980s to allow it to crystallize.20 The concept of corporatism, as reintroduced by Schmitter, never became more than an, albeit
incredibly powerful, heuristic, perhaps to the disappointment of some of its
proponents, but very likely for the long-term benefit of social science. The
lasting achievement, it would seem, of Schmitters article of 1974 was that it
sent an entire generation of social scientists off on a gigantic research expedition aimed at discovering and exploring ever new forms and functions of organized collectivism and collective action in the politics of advanced industrial
democracies, and in the conduct of what later came to be referred to as their
governance. Indeed, in subsequent years corporatism was uncovered, not
only in the most unlikely places but also in a truly astonishing variety of
shapes and sizes (see Falkner in this volume). Thus in addition to national
corporatism, corporatism was detected at the sectoral and regional level. The
discovery of meso- as distinguished from macro-corporatism (Cawson 1985),
allowing for the coexistence of different kinds of statesociety relations within
the same country, was soon to be followed by that of micro-corporatism, in the
form of close cooperation between management and labour in individual
firms, such as in Japan.21 Also, adding to tripartite corporatism involving the
state, business and labour (or the state and other organizations representing
opposing interests, such as associations of doctors and health insurance funds;
Wiesenthal 1981) there was bipartite corporatism between a state and just one
organized group, like in Japanese corporatism without labor (Pempel and
18
Tsunekawa 1979). Another version was industry associations, for example of

the chemical industry, voluntarily undertaking to enforce certain environmental standards among their members, so the state would and could refrain from
direct legislative intervention or bureaucratic control. Forms of corporatism
were also found that were confined to specific policy arenas (policy as
opposed to societal corporatism) like vocational training or standardization,
some of which involved traditional rights and obligations to group selfgovernment, or Selbstverwaltung, for example through Chambers of
Commerce and Industry with compulsory membership.22
Generally, the corporatist debate heightened the attention of a variety of
disciplines for the complex and diverse institutional structures that exist in the
interstices between state and society, mediating between the public and the
private and between compulsory and voluntary modes of collective action, and
serving simultaneously as extended arms of the state into civil society and as
conduits for civil society into the state. Here the concept of private interest
government (Streeck and Schmitter 1984, 1985) proved useful as it emphasized the blurring of the boundary between state and civil society that was and
is at the heart of any form of corporatism, where organized groups participate
in and contribute to the making of binding political decisions. Later Colin
Crouch in a magisterial survey of European countries (1993) would speak of
an established practice of a sharing of public spaces in some and indeed most
European societies, while others saw neo-corporatism as enriching the repertoire of public policy and thereby relieving the modern democratic state of
otherwise potentially unsolvable problems of governability (following
Schmitter 1981).
Critics, to the extent that they managed to make themselves heard, sometimes attributed the rise of the neo-corporatist paradigm to the fact that its core
concepts were excessively loosely defined, so that too many diverse phenomena could be subsumed under them.23 That criticism can hardly apply to
Schmitters seminal paper of 1974 which made a truly exemplary effort to
specify in detail the types of corporatism and pluralism it put forward. Still, it
cannot be denied that subsequently Schmitter and others writing on corporatism took a rather catholic view if yet another newly discovered institutional
form was offered as a specimen to be included in the corporatist inventory.
Had the aim been theory in a strict sense, more conceptual rigidity might
perhaps have been desirable. But theory was not on the agenda, or in any case
could not possibly have been. Following Kaplan (1964), social science is well
advised to begin its inquiries with broadly defined concepts that allow for the
discovery of unexpected objects and unknown relations of similarity and
difference, enabling researchers gradually to reorganize their initial image of
the real world. Whether progress towards less open definitions is at all possible and indeed desirable in social science may be debated; perhaps reality
19
simply changes too fast ever to permit conceptual closure. In any case, it
seems reasonable to assume that the period of exploration should last longer
when the object of research is a historical world that does not lend itself easily
to interrogation by controlled experiment. Even if one does not, like the
present author, subscribe to the admittedly radical view that in the social
sciences a good heuristic is always to be preferred over the best theory, one
may admit that as long as the task is to open up a new field of investigation,
loose definitions are much superior to rigid ones. That today we know so much
more about the institutional forms and political uses of organized collectivism
in the advanced industrial democracies of the late twentieth century is clearly
owing to the open conceptual architecture and the non-dogmatic, flexible use
of core concepts as heuristic devices during the high time of the corporatist
debate of the 1970s and 1980s.
THE BURSTING OF THE BUBBLE

That the rise of neo-corporatism to the status of a core concept of contemporary social science was linked to the political configuration of the years after
1968 was evidenced indirectly by the confusion caused in the neo-corporatist
camp during the 1980s by the victorious advance of monetarism as the lead
doctrine of economic policy. Keynesianism with strong unions, corporatist or
not, did not last long. As the 1980s began, its shortcomings became increasingly visible. With hindsight, the neo-corporatist era may appear today as no
more than a rearguard effort to defend the increasingly obsolete post-war
settlement between the state, capital and labour, an effort that was doomed to
fail as, after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods international regime, it had
to rely exclusively on national political resources at a time of rapidly advancing internationalization of the capitalist economy.
Not that national neo-corporatism had been without its own, domestic
flaws. In many countries, it did not take long for policy-makers to discover
that the concessions that had to be made to unions year after year were becoming ever more expensive with time, and more often than not simply moved
inflation forward into the future or caused a crippling accumulation of public
debt. Also, union leaders frequently turned out to be unable to deliver on their
promises of wage moderation, forced as they were to be responsive to a restive
and demanding membership. Sometimes cooperative unions suffered a loss of
confidence among core constituencies, which ultimately forced them to withdraw from concertation, even though they did command a neo-corporatist
representational monopoly and a high degree of centralization. There also was
apparently no guarantee that neo-corporatist intermediary organizations,
however much supported by public organizational privileges, would always be
20
able to maintain a sufficiently high level of membership and organizational

density. With the onset of the 1980s, union membership began to decline
almost everywhere, as in the 1960s, and although the political status of neocorporatist interest intermediaries is less dependent on member support than
that of pluralist pressure groups, it is not entirely independent of it either.
There also were indications that growing market pressures and intensifying
structural change, caused by both economic internationalization and changing
domestic policies, were making it more difficult for associational leaders, of
labour as well as of business, to aggregate the diverse interests of their
members into a common, collective interest and impose the sort of discipline
on their membership that is a condition of success in neo-corporatist institutional settings.
Another reason why a gap soon began to widen between a changing real
world and the neo-corporatist ideal type was the fact that business increasingly
refused to play its role in the neo-corporatist game. Pace Panitch and the anticorporatist left,24 business was never enthusiastic about institutionalized
tripartism, which it essentially and largely correctly perceived as a vehicle for
organized labour to insert itself in the centre of economic policy-making.
While sometimes tripartite cooperation had to be accepted for reasons of political expediency as a second-best solution, or as the lesser evil compared to
unbridled shopfloor militancy, the business class always resented corporatist
encroachments on managerial prerogative; was afraid of political interference,
in a negotiated economy, with their freedom to invest or not to invest; and
increasingly believed, rightly or not, that labour and the democratic national
state were responsible for what they experienced as an exacerbating profit
squeeze. For a while it might have appeared that business had no choice but to
go along: organize in the same way as labour, develop the same political skills,
and seek to make its fortune in politically negotiated enterprises in socially
regulated markets. But as political and economic pressures mounted, business
leaders began to look for ways out of what now seemed to them a corporatist
trap.25 Here they were soon to be joined by governments increasingly hardpressed to find ways of disciplining a working class that had grown ever more
demanding, if not with respect to nominal wage increases, then all the more to
social policy and the regulation of labour markets.
The accelerated internationalization of the capitalist economy that took off
in the 1980s was not simply the result of a conspiracy between capitalists and
conservative national governments. Yet internationalization was soon discovered to offer a unique opportunity for redressing the power balance within
national political economies at the expense of the winner of the battles of the
late 1960s, organized labour. That discovery was made, not just by business,
but also by national governments who, sometimes inspired by their countries
business associations, learned to use international organizations, in particular
21
the European Union, to secure for themselves binding external mandates for
opening up and thereby liberalizing their more and more politicized and politically increasingly unmanageable domestic economies (Moravcsik 1998).
Business associations, for their part, ceased defending national home markets
and instead pressed for deregulation and the free flow, not just of goods and
services, but also of capital, as a way of liberating profit accumulation from
the increasingly uncomfortable political constraints imposed on it since the
1970s. Soon a broad wave of industrial restructuring was under way to make
national economies fit for globalization, accompanied by urgent demands for
deep reforms in collective bargaining, labour law and a de-commodifying
social welfare state, reforms that chipped away at the post-war settlement as
they reinforced the role of free markets by weakening the control of governments and organized interests over economic activities and the formation of
relative prices.
Who led the neo-liberal attacks on corporatism, business or government,
differed between countries, and so did the specific forms such attacks took. A
historical breakthrough was undoubtedly the success of Thatcherism in
Britain, which proved to an attentive international audience of government
leaders that labour-exclusive monetarist methods of bringing down inflation
were not only effective but also politically sustainable, even though initially
they involved very high rates of unemployment. More than anything else, the
Thatcherist experiment put to rest once and for all the received wisdom of
post-war political economy that democratically elected governments, and
perhaps democracy as such, could not survive at a level of unemployment
above the Keynesian maximum of five per cent. As a result the costs to
governments of concessions to trade unions, which had been rising anyway,
suddenly weighed much higher, especially because unemployment turned out
to be useful also to weaken excessively self-confident trade unions, and with
them the effective resistance of workers against liberal reforms of labour
markets and welfare states. That lesson was eagerly absorbed by governments
in all European countries, and while it was applied in different ways and
degrees, the fact alone that governments now had a credible alternative to
corporatism caused a major shift in the political-economic balance of power.
To be sure, the demise of incomes policy, and with it the most prominent
variant of neo-corporatist political exchange, had begun already in the late
1970s, with the discovery of international monetary cooperation and independent central banking as new and politically less expensive instruments for
bringing down inflation. Here German leadership was decisive, first when the
Bundesbank in 1976 switched to a strictly monetarist policy avant la lettre,
and then when the Schmidt government initiated the snake to contain
exchange rate fluctuations within Europe. From then on, all European central
banks had in effect to follow the Bundesbank, which de facto turned into the,
22
politically independent, central bank of the whole of Western Europe.

Subsequently inflation rates in OECD countries fell rapidly and converged on
a historical low where they have since remained, entirely without institutional
convergence on neo-corporatist structures or political convergence on neocorporatist political exchange. As a consequence the correlation in crossnational comparisons of economic performance between neo-corporatism and
monetary stability that was observed in the 1970s effectively vanished
(Kenworthy 2002; Streeck and Kenworthy 2005, p. 457).26
In the literature the move from Keynesian tripartism to monetarist unilateralism was reflected, among other things, in an increasingly revisionist reading
of the German case, once the shining example of concerted action, voluntary
wage restraint by large, encompassing trade unions and stable social partnership between capital and labour under the auspices of a semi-sovereign and
at the same time enabling state (Katzenstein 1987). Today we know more
about the increasingly vicious infighting between German trade unions and the
Schmidt government in the second half of the 1970s, which was carefully
covered up by the Chancellor to placate his left-leaning party. Modell
Deutschland, the brand name of German neo-corporatism that proved so
successful in the 1976 election campaign and attracted so much international
admiration as well as resentment, was always more a propaganda formula
designed, hopefully, to turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy, than it was a true
representation of social partnership in the German political economy. Scharpf
(1987 [1991]) had been among the first to draw attention to the crucial role
played by the Bundesbank, as opposed to Konzertierte Aktion, in keeping
German inflation as low as it was; and his work gives an impression of the
great sense of gratitude with which Schmidt regarded the political independence of the bank, which to some extent at least shielded him against the ever
more expensive demands made on the government by a union leadership that
was, in turn, driven by an ever more demanding membership (Scharpf 1987
[1991], 133 ff.).
In subsequent years, under the Kohl government, the neo-corporatist interpretation of the German case shifted, as it were, from the demand to the supply
side. Now it was no longer monetary stability that neo-corporatism contributed
to German prosperity, but high skills, trustful cooperation at the workplace,
flexible internal labour markets, rapid adjustment to new technology, successful technology transfer to small and medium-sized firms, and so on, that is, the
wide range of capacities that supposedly enabled German firms to prosper
under the restrictive zero inflation policies of a mercilessly myopic central
bank that refused to care about growth or employment (Streeck 1994). Rather
than about distribution, Modell Deutschland now was assumed to be about
production, and the monetarist whip of the Bundesbank was perceived above
all as a strong incentive for actors in the political economy to seek cooperation
23
and avoid conflict by availing themselves of the rich variety of para-state institutions that happened to be around as a for once fortuitous legacy of German
history. Now, actually, the emphasis was on cooperation rather than conflict,
and increasingly it became focused on the subnational level of policy sectors
or, indeed, firms. While the research on supply-side corporatism (Streeck
1984) that ensued remained interested in the organizational forms of interest
intermediation, it no longer looked primarily at the national institutions and
the macroeconomic policies that had been at the centre of the early corporatism research, but at subnational (regional, sectoral or workplace-level)
arrangements promoting cooperation between competitors or between actors
with either different interests or complementary capacities.27
A further contribution to the bursting of the neo-corporatist bubble in the
1980s was the palpable failure of neo-corporatism to advance from the
national to the international, or supranational, level. As far as Western Europe
is concerned, this was not necessarily for lack of trying, especially on the part
of the European Commission and the European peak associations of labour.
Hopes, however, for the European Union to become a vehicle for carrying to
a higher level and into a new age the social-democratic-cum-neo-corporatist
politics of the 1970s soon proved baseless (Streeck and Schmitter 1991). With
Maastricht, the turn of the second Delors Commission towards supply-side
economic policies, the introduction of Monetary Union, the Stability Pact and,
at the latest, Eastern Enlargement, it was firmly established that United Europe
would never be anything like the super-sized replica of the European post-war
nation state that some believed it would become as a matter of course. Instead,
and in spite of brave efforts to the contrary, the European Union developed
into an intergovernmental-supranational machinery to promote the liberalization of the European economy, institutionalizing above and beyond the nation
state not just the monetarism of the Bundesbank, but also and in addition a
strict policy of fiscal austerity that constrains national welfare states to embark
on fundamental liberalizing reforms.
Small wonder that, in an environment like this, not even European-level
collective bargaining got off the ground (see Falkner in this volume). While
under the Social Dialogue the organizations of the European social partners
are kindly invited, and indeed well paid, to participate in regulating a narrowly
circumscribed catalogue of details, such as the minimum duration of parental
leave in member countries, they remain excluded from the fundamental decisions that are today reshaping the European political economy, in particular
the management of the supply of supranational money and the restrictions on
the means national governments may deploy to combat unemployment.
Divided as they are along national lines by different economic interests, organizational traditions and institutional legacies, the social partners will probably never be able to play any other than a marginal role in the process of
24
economic Europeanization not least since business on its part has no interest
whatsoever in a sort of tripartism that would undo the present institutional
insulation of European economic policy-making from politics, and thereby
decouple Europeanization from the liberalization with which it is now so
firmly aligned.
As internationalization proceeded, organized collective participation in
public policy, including tripartite concertation between government, business
and labour, did not suddenly disappear. But it remained confined to national
arenas which, in the course of European integration, became embedded in supranational markets and governed by supranational imperatives of austerity and
liberalization. As a consequence its agenda was more and more set, as it were,
from above. How that agenda was worked off, within the limits of an overarching regime of international market-making, was left to national politics, as was
the procurement of political legitimacy for the painful decisions that were often
required. It was in this context that an apparent renaissance of tripartism was
observed in the 1990s by a variety of authors studying the efforts of European
governments to meet the accession criteria of Monetary Union and get their
domestic economies in shape for an integrated European market subject to a
hard currency policy. The key observation of the broad literature on national
social pacts that grew up during the decade seems to have been that in many
countries governments did not follow the example of Thatcherist Britain and
instead negotiated with their trade unions, weakened by unemployment as they
may have been, agreements on wage moderation and other matters like labour
market and welfare state reform and the consolidation of public budgets
(Baccaro 2002; Ebbinghaus and Hassel 2000; Pochet and Fajertag 2000).
For some, the national pacts of the 1990s proved that earlier pronouncements of an end of the corporatist century were premature. However, although
broad conceptualizations of social phenomena, as has been noted, may sometimes be productive, lack of conceptual closure may make one overlook
important discontinuities as the world moves on. Much of the recent literature
on corporatism seems bent on demonstrating at almost all costs that corporatism is not dead, however dead it may appear, and indeed will never die.
Both economic and political reasons are offered concerning why corporatism
will and must eventually survive the onslaught of liberalization. Upon closer
inspection, however, one would probably want to be a little less sanguine.
Organized and indeed institutionalized political collectivism did not at once
disappear with the monetarist explosion of the corporatist core of the de facto
constitution of European post-war democratic capitalism. But rather than
simply the old in new guise, what is now observed may be better conceived as
a collection of fragments, structural and functional, of the old corporatist
construction fragments that continue to be used, like the ruins of ancient
monuments, by being converted to new, less grandiose purposes.
25
Most fundamentally, unlike the political exchange of the 1970s the national
pacts of the 1990s operated under monetarist rather than Keynesian auspices
and were designed, and indeed constrained, to accommodate markets rather
than correct them. This raises the possibility, not taken seriously enough by
much of the literature, that labour inclusion in public policy may have ceased
to be indicative of labours political strength, strategic wisdom or functional
indispensability. Most governments and employers seem to prefer austerity
policies with a social pact over austerity policies without one, and find
economic and welfare state restructuring with union cooperation more attractive than without, provided that the fundamental imperatives of economic
liberalization are not questioned. But this need not mean that they must allow
unions in return to make more than a marginal or merely symbolic difference.
Governments that would have the strength to attack the unions institutional
position may use it to make unions cooperate, rather than attack them. It may
be above all here that the policies of Continental-European governments differ
from the ideological anti-unionism of their American and British counterparts.
Unions, in turn, that like IG Metall may still command a residue of strength,
may prefer Labourism over corporatism and withhold cooperation in national
pacts if governments have nothing they could offer them in exchange, while
weak unions may cooperate anyway, hoping in this way to protect their organizational status. What from the outside may look like a continuation of the
class corporatism of the post-war order, therefore, may in fact be no more than
tactical caution on the part of governments and employers, and strategic impotence and confusion on the part of unions. What counts is that what continues
to be identified by some as neo-corporatism is today deeply embedded in an
economic and political context of pressures for flexibility, deregulation,
decentralization, and so on, sharply constraining what trade unions as actors in
national politics can demand, not to mention a pervasive neo-liberal discourse
emphasizing diversity, individualism and voluntarism, and cultivating a vigorous resentment against any kind of standardized regulation.28
In part, change since the 1970s is reflected in the many qualifiers used in
the literature to characterize the specificities of the neo-neo-corporatism of
the 1990s. Thus some authors speak of competitive corporatism (Rhodes
2001) to indicate the cooperative-productivistic character of national pacts
and the corresponding absence or secondary significance in them of distributional issues; here one is reminded of the earlier discovery of supply-side
corporatism. Others use terms like lean corporatism (Traxler 2001; Traxler
et al. 2001) to emphasize that the new alliances are less demanding on the
participants with respect to their organizational capacities. For example, as
Regini (2000) argued early on, whether or not the unions involved in
national pacts commanded corporatist organizational structures was largely
irrelevant (see also Baccaro 2002), and indeed the strategic choices of
26
collective organizations with respect to participation in concertation and

cooperation seemed less than before driven by their structural characteristics.
Similarly, it no longer appeared of importance for successful pact-making
whether governments were of a conservative or social-democratic political
complexion (Hassel 2000, 2003). Overall it seems to be mostly general
concerns for governability that may continue to motivate governments to
invite participation in public policy-making of organized social groups of all
sorts, not just trade unions and employers (see also Culpepper 2002, who
emphasizes the role of associations as providers of information to government). After the class corporatism of the post-war settlement had been blown
apart in the monetarist big bang, what the corporatist literature of today
investigates is a vast variety of specific and differential uses of collectivism for
public policy purposes serving as a convenient supplement to, and sometimes
even a vehicle for, the delegation of public policy to free markets, driven by
administrative rather than power-political expedience and more than ever turning organized groups into instruments of the state, rather than the state having
to share public power with organized class interests disadvantaged by freemarket capitalism.
THE NEO-LIBERAL TURN

In the neo-corporatist decade, many of those who devoted scholarly attention
to the study of organized collectivism in the politics of European democracies
thought of their work as ultimately contributing to practically relevant knowledge on how to utilize the particularistic expression of special interests for
purposes of good governance. Their guiding assumption, based on empirical
studies of private interest government of all sorts, was that it was through a
range of political and organizational incentives (material give-and-take,
opportunities for collective participation, provisions for organizational security) that interest associations could be induced to express and articulate the
interests of their members in such a way that they became compatible with and
supportive of common interests shared by all. How exactly this was to be
achieved was difficult to express in general terms, as successive case studies
seemed to reveal ever new ways by which organized interests were both pacified and satisfied. Still, the more or less explicit expectation was that continued research would in the end yield something like a manual of cooperative
governance for artful policy-makers in societies divided by conflicting interests, a set of recipes for political-economic success in democratic polities that
were obliged to recognize and welcome rather than suppress the independent
organization of their citizens, especially their working class.
From the beginning this programme was deemed utterly unrealistic and
27
indeed ideological by liberals of all stripes. As neo-classical economics began

to extend its reach to the analysis of institutions and collective action, one of
its main objectives was in fact to demonstrate, conveniently by means of
deductive formal modelling, that organized collectivism inevitably detracted
from a societys overall welfare.29 Public policy, therefore, rather than sharing
its authority with private interest associations had to do its utmost to insulate
itself against them and, where it could not altogether abolish organized interests in the name of free markets or individual liberty, neutralize them by
subjecting them to as much pluralist competition as possible (see, for example, Grossman and Helpman 2001; Persson and Tabellini 2000).
Neo-classical theory did and does recognize the possibility of a public use
of private interests in that it conceives of the common good as a by-product of
a free play of market forces. But it was, and remains, unwilling to accept that
there could also be a productive public use of private organized interests.
Fundamentally this applied even to an author like Mancur Olson (1971), who
was originally prepared to concede to neo-corporatists that what he called
distributional coalitions were less damaging and perhaps even productive if
they were organized in an encompassing rather than a fragmented pattern.
Later, however, this distinction was increasingly lost, also by Olson himself
(Olson 1982), and one mathematical proof was added to another to show that
Pareto optimality was attainable only through exchanges between individuals
in markets properly regulated, not by distributional coalitions, but by a liberal
state protecting its freedom from any sort of political-collectivistic intervention.
The advance of neo-liberal ideas may in part be explained by the fact that
corporatist theory never managed to produce a general statement of the
conditions under which private interest government may enhance or, to the
contrary, detract from the general welfare. Perhaps this was impossible since
whether admitting organized interests to public status is beneficial to a society
or not might ultimately depend on the historical context or on intangibles like
a political culture impregnated by a sense of collective discipline or national
purpose. Clearly, recourse to the Olsonian distinction between encompassing
and non-encompassing organizations was not enough to distinguish with sufficient confidence between responsible self-government and agency capture, for
example in areas like vocational training or standardization. Cases could be
found in which encompassing organization was used to frustrate responsible
policies, as well as cases in which fragmented interest organization lent itself
to collectively responsible concertation (Baccaro 2002; Regini 2000). Perhaps
the problem was, and will continue to be, that deductive modelling can always
and easily be driven to a point where monopoly is shown to produce less optimal results than competition. By comparison, the inductive knowledge generated by research on neo-corporatism inevitably includes the observation that
28
even the best-conceived strategies can fail in the real world, and that it
depends in part on the fortuna of policy-makers whether or not the virt of
encompassing organization may work itself out in a given situation.
Another factor, as repeatedly pointed out by Schmitter himself, may have
been the absence of a normative theory, or justification, of neo-corporatism.
What the corporatists of the 1970s had to offer was, perhaps, a realistic theory
of interest organization in post-war democracies, and what some of them were
working towards might have become an (inevitably compromised) praxeology
of how to integrate organized interest groups into the governance of a diverse
modern society. But either way, it remained unable to develop the charismatic
or utopian attraction that social theories may exercise if they manage to align
themselves with strong moral values. Even neo-liberalism, with its pathos of
individual freedom and responsibility, seems to be doing better in this respect.
It was not just the ambiguous history of their core concept that made it difficult for neo-corporatists to popularize their insights by providing them with a
normative coating. Very likely, corporatism worked, if at all, precisely
because, and only as long as, the way it worked was not publicly explained.30
For example, while one could have defended neo-corporatism as an effective
way in practice of giving workers and their organizations a say in the running
of a capitalist political economy, the concept and its practice were so devoid
of any utopian vision that precisely class-conscious trade unionists and Social
Democrats, especially in Scandinavia, refused to accept it even as a description of what they were doing. In fact, it was the often explicitly anti-corporatist
new social movements of the 1970s, and not the theorists and practitioners
of neo-corporatism, who were able to claim for themselves a new, morally
superior vision of participatory citizenship.
Of course the declining popularity of corporatist theory and practice in the
1990s also reflected changes in the real world. In addition to those discussed
in the preceding section, one may refer here to the tendency in most European
countries for organizations of business and labour to become less externally
encompassing and, at the same time, more internally divided, neo-corporatist
institutions providing organizational security notwithstanding.31 A less organized society implies more significant divisions between the organized and the
non-organized, the latter being the favourite theoretical, although not necessarily practical-political, clientele of the neo-liberal critique of collectivism.
The most important such clientele consists of the growing numbers of longterm unemployed whose interests became adopted by neo-liberal economics to
be played against the organized interests of the employed and in particular to
discredit the neo-corporatist conviction that social problems are best resolved
by cooperation and concertation. Moreover, increasing internal tensions
within corporatist organizations make them less willing than they might otherwise be to commit their members to compromised common policies, and this
TThe study of organized interests: before the century and after
29
holds for business associations urged by governments to hold on to social partnership, as well as for trade unions invited to share responsibility for liberalizing reforms in labour markets and welfare states.
Today those theorists or practitioners of economic policy are rare who are
convinced that the social and economic problems of the age are best addressed
by political concertation of organized interests. Even after the monetarist big
bang, pragmatism may still advise inviting organized labour into national
pacts and may caution against formally abolishing collective bargaining or
worker participation on the shopfloor and in the enterprise. But what protects
the institutions inherited from the 1960s and 1970s is less and less a positive
belief in the superiority, economic or moral, of consensual collective decisionmaking over free markets. The hegemonic theory of the day, the dominant
public discourse and, increasingly, the practical wisdom of political decisionmakers seem to have more or less accepted the neo-liberal equation of interest
politics with rent-seeking; of cooperation with collusion; of inclusion of organized interests in the public sphere with exclusion of those not represented by
established organizations; and of neo-corporatism with social closure and a
political-economic conspiracy in favour of a new establishment of job owners,
native citizens, old industries and the like. Not only liberals and conservatives,
but also a growing number of Social Democrats, especially in government,
have come to believe that the only way to reform is by restoring the independence of the state from, and its sovereign authority over, organized interests.
While this does not preclude offering trade unions a seat on the reform bandwagon to satisfy the vanity of their leaders, governments seem increasingly
determined to control the direction of reform and move, if necessary, without
trade unions and even, conditions being favourable, against them.
Only a few areas seem to be left in which policy-makers and observers (and
in any case probably only a minority of them) are inclined to consider collectively negotiated solutions superior to market solutions instituted by means of
a neo-liberal regulatory state. Countries and parties differ with respect to the
extent to which they may be willing to make use of the fragments of post-war
corporatism to deal with problems of public policy. For example, governments
pursuing liberalization and privatization may find it expedient to devolve what
used to be state responsibilities, not to individuals, but to organized collectivities. While this cuts back on direct state provision, and is in this sense tantamount to liberalization, it also bears traits of neo-corporatism in that it
involves interest organizations in the conception and execution of public policies. A well-documented case is pension reform in Germany after 1998, where
private supplementary insurance for retirement pensions could for political
reasons not be made obligatory and as a result floundered for lack of participation (Trampusch 2005). The problem was overcome when trade unions and
employer associations successfully lobbied the legislature to insert a provision
30
in the law that made company pension plans eligible for tax relief if they were
created by collective agreement. Even the trade union of the metalworkers,
which had fiercely opposed the reform on principle, negotiated an agreement
of this sort with its counterpart, Gesamtmetall. Among other things, the two
sides set up a joint body to propagate participation in the supplementary
pension system on the assumption that by inserting themselves in this important and technically complicated subject area they were offering a service to
their members which would help them improve their standing with their
membership.
Another field in which organized collectivism might still be allowed a positive role in the liberalizing economy of today may be the structural adjustment
of regions or countries to international market pressures. Politically organized
territorial communities may undertake to respond to competition, not by costcutting and downward adjustment of their general standard of living, but by
specialization in a high value-added international market niche (Porter 1990).
A growing literature argues that such specialization will require a suitable
physical and institutional infrastructure supporting the firms on whose
successful performance the communitys collective prosperity depends.
According to part of the post-corporatist literature, building this sort of infrastructure is best done if government, business, trade unions and other groups
join forces for a cooperative and coordinated structural policy, so as to insure
their common economic fortunes against the risks of international price
competition and demand fluctuation. To a large extent, this is what is at the
bottom of the concept of competitive corporatism (Rhodes 1998). Like
Katzensteins (1985) Small States in World Markets, although referring more
to the supply than to the demand side, it extols the benefits for collective
competitiveness of a cooperative interest politics. A case in which it seems to
have been possible to forge an encompassing social compact of interest groups
of all sorts, in pursuit of what Crouch et al. (2004) have called collective
competition goods supporting a national supply-side strategy of international
competitiveness, seems to be Ireland (Baccaro 2004).
If there is a future, then, for institutionalized political collectivism after the
neo-liberal turn, many believe it to be in the provision of collective goods
required for the international competitiveness of local communities, trying to
realize a negotiated vision of national or regional competitive advantage. As
indicated above, whether or not this implies that there is a future for corporatism is a matter of how broad a definition one is willing to adopt. How different, in any case, the new configurations are from the class corporatism of the
post-war world is demonstrated not least by the Irish example. While the
Alliance did include trade unions and employers associations, it included
many other groups as well, and indeed was explicitly designed to combat
insiderism, that is, the privileged position of the traditional trade union
31
movement. Bearing no resemblance at all to the institutionalized tripartism of

classical neo-corporatism, the Alliance neither had a need for corporatist organizational structures, nor was it supportive of their emergence. Moreover, it
involved conceding a broad band of privileges to American multinational
employers whom Ireland was eager to attract.32 In fact, their fluid composition
and the mostly voluntary character of participation in them make todays
alliances for regional restructuring resemble, much more than post-war corporatism, the model of associative democracy proposed by Cohen and Rogers
(1995) or that of directly-deliberative polyarchy as developed by Cohen and
Sabel (1997). Associations organizing social classes may be present but are
not dominant in them; joint pragmatic problem-solving takes the place of
distributive bargaining; and as authoritative decision-making and distributive
politics give way to the joint creation of incentives for investors, there is very
little of the sharing of state authority between government and organized interests that was characteristic of neo-corporatism, especially at the regional level
where such authority is not (or is much less) present in the first place.
BEYOND CORPORATISM
Not only has the world changed since the 1970s, but so has social science
and not surprisingly given that the social sciences are invariably informed by
the changing practical concerns and problems of their time. But while the
corporatist debate of the 1970s may in the end not have left much of an
impression on the real world, it did profoundly affect the way social science
reflects on it, and it may be appropriate at the conclusion of this essay to draw
attention to selected aspects of its continuing impact.
Paradoxically, the impact of the neo-corporatist heuristic seems to be least
discernible for the study of interest groups in a narrow sense, where one is
today witnessing an astonishing renaissance of lobbying as a concept and as
a subject of study (Kohler-Koch 1994; Mazey and Richardson 1993). Possible
explanations are not hard to imagine. To the extent that economic decisionmaking has shifted to new arenas like the European Union, contact between
business and public authorities is apparently easier to organize on an AngloAmerican pattern than on a neo-corporatist model as developed over a long
time and in different versions in some but not all Continental-European countries. The rise of large firms as political actors and independent representatives
of their interests, which was commented upon already in the 1980s,
contributed its part, not just internationally but increasingly also within
national systems, even those with a corporatist tradition (Coen 1997, 1998).
Following the example of the Anglo-American world and the emerging practice of international organizations, Continental-European governments learned
32
to deal with large firms one-on-one, and apparently insisted less than in the
past on speaking only to associations representing the collective view of
groups of firms.33
Business associations, for their part, often seem to have lost either the
capacity or the strategic will to accept public responsibility and mediate
between government policies and the demands of their members. In a variety
of European countries, as neo-corporatist arrangements crumbled under the
impact of liberalization, business associations increasingly adopted an aggressive public relations strategy to push governments towards ever more liberalizing reforms that led them away from social partnership. One may add to this
the attenuating relations between social democratic parties and trade unions,
which made the latter also assume a more adversarial posture in relation to
government and the state in general, resulting in less moderation of demands
and a more independent, pluralist style of interest politics.
Nor did the literature on neo-corporatism have as much impact on the study
of industrial relations as one might have expected. As unions lost power, academic interest in them declined. In the USA, but also in Britain, leading industrial relations departments and research institutes were abolished or renamed
during the 1990s. Where they survived under a new name (typically one that
referred, in one way or other, to what came to be called human resource
management) the change was one of substance. Increasingly it was no longer
the study of trade unions and collective bargaining that opened up careers
within the practical world, but rather that of compensation packages, performance incentives, human capital formation and personnel management in
general, administered unilaterally and from above in what became as a matter
of course assumed to be a union-free environment. In Continental Europe,
where industrial relations was never more than a sub-discipline in the intersection of sociology, political science and labour law, only very few in successive new generations of students felt attracted by it, while the number of
aspiring personnel specialists enrolled in the business administration departments of the old public universities and of a growing number of new private
ones exploded. If more than a small minority of these had ever seriously
engaged literature on trade unions and collective bargaining, not to mention
corporatism, one would have to be very surprised.
Of course, while initially there had been a strong affinity between the neocorporatist heuristic and the study of institutionalized class relations, the
former soon came to be applied to other subjects and areas of inquiry. In the
corporatist literature, free collective bargaining served as a model of how, in a
liberal democracy with vibrant collectivism, independently organized social
groups might become involved in the making of publicly binding decisions,
with states and governments constrained to respect their autonomy, arrange
their own decision-making around them and learn to share their authority with
33
them. The underlying idea, namely that major political decisions on the structure and direction of modern societies were sometimes made, not by the state
alone but by the state in cooperation with organized collective actors in society, appealed to scholars reflecting in the 1970s on the potential and, by implication, the limits of state intervention in society and economy. For example, in
their attempt to develop a theory of how a democratic state might be used by
a modern society to organize itself and control the course of its own development (a theory of gesellschaftliche Steuerung), Mayntz and Scharpf puzzled
over the limited success of social democratic reform in Germany, finding it
increasingly unsatisfactory to conceive of public policy exclusively in terms
of state decisions (Mayntz and Scharpf 1995; Mayntz 1997). Instead they
began looking for a concept of Steuerung that included the possibility of state
government cooperating with organized social groups and of public policy
being negotiated between the state and an organized civil society.
Steuerung was originally translated as steering, or control, but later
these terms were replaced with governance.34 Abandoning a state-centred
and hierarchical perspective on public policy, governance refers to the entirety
of processes and agents involved in making binding selections from alternative possibilities and thereby creating social order. Originally the concept
seems to have been introduced by the new institutional economics, most
prominently Oliver Williamson (Williamson 1987; Williamson et al. 1975), in
an effort to demonstrate that economic transactions that are governed by the
market (that is, not governed by the state) are nevertheless not without government or at least need not be, since private individuals pursuing their advantage in the market were capable of freely contracting, not just on the terms of
their exchanges, but also on institutions to govern the latter where this might
be necessary. Soon thereafter, however, the concept was imported into the
corporatist discourse, to reflect the blurred boundary between state and society observed in contemporary democracies; emphasize that private actors take
part alongside public ones in the making of binding decisions; and draw attention to the contribution of private interest governments to social order
(Hollingsworth, Schmitter and Streeck 1994). With its spread to a more statecentred tradition of policy studies originating in administrative science and
implementation research, the concept then paved the way for the incorporation
of some of the core insights of the corporatist debate into theories of public
policy-making.35
Todays burgeoning literature on social, political and economic governance as a complex interaction between state and non-state actors builds on
one of the cornerstones of the neo-corporatist heuristic, the intertwining of
state and civil society. That same notion is also present in current work on
policy networks which takes off from the idea that political decisions originate
in interactions between a variety of loosely coupled individual and collective
34
agents of all kinds (Marin and Mayntz 1993). Who belongs to a policy
network, and who is central or peripheral to its operation, is treated essentially
as an empirical question; it may also change, as networks are conceived as
more open than corporatist arrangements and as potentially highly flexible and
easy to reorganize.36 Policy networks are also seen as specialized in narrow
areas of decision-making. The main difference, however, between network
analysis and the neo-corporatist tradition, and certainly the tradition of
Steuerungstheorie, is that the former goes much further than the two others in
divesting the state or its authorities of special responsibility for the overall
direction of policy. While the neo-corporatist study of private interest government and the concept of gesellschaftliche Steuerung did admit a plurality of
agents as involved in the making of public policy, their ultimate objective was
a sophisticated praxeology for an informed state of how to cajole an independent, interest-conscious, eigenwillige civil society into contributing to a,
however negotiated and compromised, common purpose. Networked as it
might be, for neo-corporatists as well as for the theorists of Steuerung it was
ultimately the state that governed, if by negotiation, due to its monopoly on the
legitimate use of force, as well as its superior democratic legitimacy and
accountability. Network analysis, even where it is more than descriptive statistics, abandons this premise, replacing as it were an action-theoretical with a
behaviourist perspective on public policy formation, and giving up collective
intentionality in favour of an empiricism for which there can be no difference
between the objectives and the outcomes of collective decision-making.37
A second important offshoot from the neo-corporatist literature, and again
especially from its engagement with industrial relations, is a broad stream of
historical-institutionalist research on political economy.38 Among the distinguishing marks of historical institutionalism, especially in comparison with
economics and its rational choice bridgeheads in social science, is that it treats
the preferences of actors as endogenous to the institutional settings in which
they are acted out. A model for this was and continues to be the way in which
neo-corporatist analyses conceived of collective interests as products of intermediation by interest associations between their members on the one hand and
extant political opportunity structures on the other. From the beginning, it was
a central topic of the corporatist literature that interests are not given but are,
and need to be, defined and interpreted in relation, among other things, to the
institutional and organizational means for their realization. Institutional and
organizational structures thus functioned as what one might call the constitutive conditions of a process in which actors determined what their best interests were. For example, workers were shown to exhibit different interests with
respect to nominal wage increases, productivity and inflation depending on
whether they were represented by craft unions in a highly decentralized collective bargaining regime, or by industrial unions negotiating for entire industries
35
or countries: while in the first case high nominal wages counted more than
monetary stability, and technological change was more of a threat than an
opportunity, in the second enhanced collective control over the side-effects of
their collective action made workers develop a vested interest in low inflation
and rising productivity as conditions of steady real wage increases (Crouch
1982; Olson 1982).39
The latest production of institutionalist political economy is, of course, the
fast-growing literature on diverse national versions of a capitalist market economy. The 1980s had seen an increasing interest among students of industrial
relations in how the corporatist governance of the employment relationship
might be linked to the governance of the economy as a whole, and in particular whether differences in industrial relations were associated with differences,
not just in the relationship between state and society, but also in national
patterns of production. Here concepts like diversified quality production
(Streeck 1991) were developed in an attempt to explore what seemed to be
elective affinities between national industrial relations regimes on the one
hand and a countrys characteristic type of production on the other. Originally
the relevant literature simply pointed out what appeared to be functional relations between the two, without exploring their origins or trying much to theorize about them. Even outside the French rgulation school, however, there
was a sense that economic strategies (including the production strategies of
firms) were not necessarily and always prior to a societys institutions, including those of industrial relations, and that in certain circumstances the latter
might in fact be the cause of the former. The prospect this raised was that
production patterns, usually believed to be exogenously imposed by the
market or strategically chosen by management, might be treated as endogenous by a new institutional economics capable of accounting for differences
between versions of modern capitalism as an economic system.
It is not the place here to trace in detail the way in which the corporatist
debate fed into the rise of the varieties of capitalism paradigm, in particular
after the implosion of state socialism and the accelerated internationalization
of the capitalist political economy in the subsequent decade.40 What suggests
itself instead is to look back and consider current theorizing on capitalist
diversity in the context of the controversies of the 1970s on convergence and
divergence in industrial society. In this perspective, the ascendancy of neoclassical economics may appear as the advent of a new theory of convergence
one, however, in which the mechanism generating homogeneity of national
political economies is no longer technology but economic competition in an
open world market. Institutionalist theories of capitalist diversity oppose the
economic theory of capitalist unity implied in neo-liberalism and contest the
view that there is one best way to organize a capitalist economy, namely
comprehensive reliance on the institutional minimalism of free markets and
36
free price formation. Indeed, rather than worldwide convergence on neoliberal best practice under pressure of international competition, the varieties of capitalism literature predicts continuing diversity, offering
reassurance to those who for whatever reason favour a more regulated and
politically coordinated version of capitalism governed by collective decisionmaking over one ruled by self-regulating markets.
The decisive question, of course, is for the mechanism believed to be
sustaining diversity between countries and their economies. In the 1970s,
when tendencies towards convergence were supposedly to emanate from technology, it was the collective action of the working class that was to make the
difference for how industrial capitalism was to be organized, and the conceptual apparatus of neo-corporatist analysis provided a language to account for
how such action became infused into public policies. Today other mechanisms
are being suggested. Apart from strategic specialization, the currently most
prominently discussed cause of continued diversity is an assumed need of
political economies for internal institutional coherence and complementarity.
The underlying idea is that, unlike what is implied by neo-liberalism, national
economies do not require a specific kind of institution for good economic
performance, but a high degree of complementarity between whatever institutions may govern them. Capitalist market economies, that is, can perform in
different ways and still perform equally well, provided their institutions fit
with one another. In fact it is suggested that there are basically two sorts of
advanced capitalism, liberal and coordinated, or individualistic and collectivistic, which can both prosper as long as each organizes its institutional
spheres according to the same logic, of free price formation in the one case and
of political-institutional coordination in the other (Hall and Soskice 2001).
As mentioned above, at one time what might have become corporatist
theory seemed to suggest that for reasons of, mostly endogenous, political
pressures for good economic performance, non-corporatist polities had to turn
corporatist sooner or later. Today economic theory is almost united in its belief
that, vice versa, neo-corporatist political economies have to turn neo-liberal,
due to exogenous (market) pressures. The varieties of capitalism approach
seems to reject both propositions. The formative experience by which it may
be inspired seems to be the failure and final defeat of neo-corporatist reform in
the UK in the 1970s and 1980s, followed by the ascendancy of the liberal and
further liberalized economies of Britain and the USA in the subsequent decade.
The lesson the theory draws from this, which it offers to the economically
declining coordinated political economies of the European Continent, is that
salvation lies in internal coherence, and rather than trying to get rid of their
political and economic collectivism and become like their temporarily more
successful competition, Continental-European political-economic systems
would be better off sticking to their inherited principles of organization.
37
Unlike its neo-corporatist predecessor, that is to say, the new theory of nonconvergence allows for little political voluntarism. The good news it brings to
political economies with neo-corporatist institutions is that they do not have to
become neo-liberal. The bad news, however, is that they could not do so
anyway, even if they wanted to.41 Nor, of course, could liberal political
economies become corporatist, and their working classes would be well
advised not even to try. This is, essentially, because any institutional reform
can only be a partial one, reorganizing no more than selected elements of an
interlocking, tightly coupled system of institutional spheres. This, however,
would undermine the complementarity of system elements and, as a result,
detract from its economic performance which not only capitalists but also
workers could not want. But then, it is not the working class that is believed
by the new theory of capitalist diversity to control the design of national institutions. Unlike in the corporatist writings of the 1970s, their architecture is
created and defended by firms vitally interested under international competition in protecting the institutional requirements of the sort of production to
which they have become accustomed.
Many questions may be raised regarding the new theory of capitalist diversity in the light of rapid social and political change sapping the strength of
collectivism in European societies; the lasting performance crisis of important
specimens of a coordinated market economy, such as Germany; and the
continuing liberalization of the European political economy in the course of
European integration. What may be worth pointing out is that the varieties of
capitalism theory of non-convergence seems to have replaced, in the spirit of
the age, political activism as a source of diversity with institutional inertia, or
path dependency, and political choice with economic constraint. Whether
institutional inertia and economic constraint will be enough to preserve the
European social model only time will tell. Here we cannot but note that
todays promises of lasting diversity assume an essentially defensive posture,
drawing hope from functionalist constructions that are not in principle different from the sort of passive-deterministic theories that the politically activist
social science of the 1970s tried to leave behind once and for all. But then, as
noted already, these are different times.
NOTES
1.
I am grateful to Lucio Baccaro, Helen Callaghan, Colin Crouch, Martin Hpner, Bernhard
Kittel, Renate Mayntz, Philippe Schmitter, Kathleen Thelen, Christine Trampusch and
Cornelia Woll for constructive comments and criticism.
2. See Schmitter (2002) for an interesting return to a subject that was always present in his
work in one form or other.
3. Unlike the convergence theories that became current at the end of the twentieth century, the
unifying force presumably driving cross-national convergence in the 1960s was not the
38
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.

market but technology. More on this important difference below. Also, in the spirit of dtente
embraced by American liberals in the 1960s, convergence between the USA and the Soviet
Union was to happen somewhere in the middle, with the former gradually embracing more
planning and the latter slowly introducing more market in their respective economic
systems (although the mid-point was undoubtedly expected to be somewhat closer to
California than to Siberia). Of course, American normalism did not always and necessarily
take the form of technological determinism. See, for example, Parsons (1971).
It is ironic that the theoretical voluntarism of the emerging New Left in European social
science undertook to ground itself on the same Marxist tradition that American convergence
theory had by then appropriated to demonstrate the inevitability of the worldwide march to
pluralist industrialism. If nothing else, this shows how differently Marx can be read. Even
more ironic, however, was the fact that the reassertion of political agency by New Left social
science remained bound to national politics and the persistence of institutional and political
differences between nations that is, units that in principle one would not expect to count
much in a leftist and thus, presumably, internationalist perspective.
In the USA, by comparison, the decline of trade unionism that had been under way all over
the Western world during the 1960s continued into the 1970s and 1980s. In most European
countries the trend was reversed for the next one-and-half decades. In the USA, instead of
an increase in the power and influence of trade unions, the discontent of the 1960s gave rise
to the civil rights movement and issued in public policies for equal opportunity in the
marketplace.
Industrial relations was also taught in Britain at the time. While the Oxford School had
different roots from its American counterpart, it was also, although for different reasons,
suspicious of excessive pragmatism (Fox 1974). Moreover, it was far less international in the
scope of its subjects and concepts, and therefore largely unsuited for export to other environments.
On the relationship between industrial relations and the early comparative politics literature,
see Streeck (2004).
Another figure to be mentioned here is, of course, Stein Rokkan who happened to be
European, however.
Philippe Schmitter, in a personal communication, reminds me of the importance of reinvention in the social sciences, which I take to mean the rediscovery and re-use of forgotten
concepts. Reading classical texts or authors that nobody remembers any more helps.
Important intellectual breakthroughs are sometimes made simultaneously and independently by more than one individual. In the present case, Schmitters impact was undoubtedly reinforced by the fact that the usefulness of corporatist concepts for the analysis of
contemporary Europe had at roughly the same time been discovered, and described in
much the same terms, by Lehmbruch (1974, 1977). As far as I know, Schmitter and
Lehmbruch learned of each other only after their ideas were basically formed and in fact
had been committed to paper. Much has been made of the differences between
Lehmbruchs liberal and Schmitters neo- corporatism, and it is true that the former
placed somewhat more emphasis on the process of policy concertation and on the, as it
were, consociational functions of corporatist arrangements, while the latter was more
concerned with the structural disposition of intermediary organizations to participate in
concertation. What is important here, however, is that Lehmbruch, coming from a very
different, and indeed very European, theoretical tradition, lent additional validity to the
conceptual language reintroduced by an American political scientist with a Latin
American research background.
For an overview of the historical background of modern theories and practices of corporatism, and for a broader discussion of the following, see Streeck and Kenworthy (2005).
For a summary of the relationship between corporatism and the European post-war settlement, see Streeck and Kenworthy (2005).
This was the time when the sarcastic and, in some cases, slightly envious label for corporatism as a growth industry (Panitch 1980) became widely used.
For the official state-Marxist reception in the GDR see Rachel (1981).
For an overview see Kenworthy (2001) and Molina and Rhodes (2002).

16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
39
For some, the difference between the well-being of the working class on the one hand and
the proper functioning of the national economy on the other was less than clear-cut. In fact
there seems to have been a growing tendency in the literature to identify the former with the
latter, at least until the advent of jobless growth in the 1990s. On the methodological shortcomings of the quantitative-comparative literature on the economic effects of corporatism,
see Kittel (2000).
One of the first to investigate empirically the relationship between corporatist structures of
interest intermediation and the general governability of a society was Schmitter, in an essay
published in 1981 (Schmitter 1981).
See the title of Schmitters and Lehmbruchs co-edited book of 1979, Trends Towards
Corporatist Intermediation (Schmitter und Lehmbruch 1979). How long-lasting and resistant to disappointment such convergence expectations were is demonstrated by the survival
of pious hopes for the European Union, the liberalization machine of the European economy,
somehow to develop into a neo-corporatist supranational polity (see Falkner, this volume).
More on this below.
Alternatively, countries lacking in economic performance could be seen as having, not
too little, but too much corporatism. Being for whatever reason unable to become more
corporatist, they might try to become more liberal by undoing the little organized collectivism they had. A seminal paper by Lange and Garrett (1985) was among the first to
point to the possibility of efficiency-driven polarization of national systems into more or
less pure types, a theme that is central to todays varieties of capitalism literature (see
below).
Such change, along with the narrow limitations of the comparative-statistical methodology
that were discovered only later, may in turn have been the reason for the often contradictory
results of the empirical analyses of the economic consequences of corporatism. A good
survey of the findings of a large number of studies is found in Hpner (1997).
Such applications of the concept contributed to the emerging identification of corporatism
with cooperation, indicated by the not infrequent misspellings of corporatism as cooperationism by attentive but less than fully literate students. From there it was not a long way to
identifying corporatism with paternalism, especially in enterprise-level industrial relations.
Streeck and Kenworthy (2005) distinguish between structural and functional corporatism,
and within the latter between concertation and self-government.
Colin Crouch, in a note to the author, speaks of a case of conceptual corruption. Since the
concept of corporatism had an ambiguous pedigree, it was vulnerable to very diverse interpretation and could be made to mean anything from state control of organized interests to
government by organized interests instead of by the state.
But also some of the more recent rational choice political science, like Swenson (1991),
which often makes it appear as though corporatism was not just the second-best but the optimal solution for business.
When in the early 1980s neo-corporatists began in earnest to study the associative action of
business (Schmitter and Streeck 1982 [1999]) they approached their subject with a conceptual apparatus that was firmly premised on the post-1968 Keynesian world. Thus internationalization and the political opportunities it offered to business did not figure at all in the
research design, except perhaps as possible inducements for higher-order, multi-level association-building in compliance with the neo-corporatist logic.
The same was true, and possibly for the same reasons, for the correlation between neocorporatism and a low incidence of industrial conflict. After the virtual disappearance of
strikes in the USA and Britain, it could no longer be claimed that the costs of neo-corporatist
concessions were balanced by lower losses due to industrial disruption.
A decade later, assumed virtue had again turned into observed vice when the productivistic
virtuous circle corporatism of the 1980s (Streeck 1991) was found to have mutated into
parasitic welfare corporatism (Streeck 2001, 2005). Basically this was a result of the social
partners securing their continued peaceful cooperation in the face of deep economic restructuring by joint exploitation, condoned by the Kohl government, of the social welfare system
for mass early retirement. The disaster (a tremendous increase in labour costs that cemented,
and added, to the very unemployment that early retirement was supposed to reduce) became
40
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.

complete when the same methods were employed after 1990 to retire the vast volume of
excess labour in the former GDR.
Something similar may apply in the Eastern European transition countries where tripartism
at the national level is imposed by the European Union as part of the acquis communautaire,
but in practice has mostly remained a faade. An intuitive affinity to collective solutions
seems even less present than in the liberalizing countries of the West, and even more than
West European trade unions those in the East of the Continent seem to be anchored, to use
the old corporatist language, in a Logic of Influence rather than of Membership.
A partial exception is the rich literature on national systems of wage formation that builds
on the seminal article by Calmfors and Drifill in which they introduce the notion of a humpshaped relationship between the centralization of wage setting and inflation (Calmfors und
Drifill 1988). Note, however, that the positive effect attributed to collectivism is limited to
monetary stability. Note also that an alternative, radically decentralized and market-driven
system is regarded as a fully functional equivalent.
Politics, Bismarck is supposed to have remarked, is like blood sausage: you dont really
want to know how it is made.
For the case of Germany see Streeck and Hassel (2004).
As a result, as Colin Crouch reminds me, inequality is now at a higher level in Ireland, a
small and homogeneous country of three million people, than in the USA.
On this and the following see Streeck and Visser (2005). Privileged access of large firms to
political decision-makers is of course not provided for in neo-classical theory, which does
not really have a place for firms as organizations. Nor is it in line with neo-liberal ideology,
which will have nothing to do with lobbying. Of course one might be tempted to argue that
the rise of neo-liberalism is in fact nothing else than the liberation of large firms from social
obligations and a restoration of their internal and external hierarchical authority (see the
introductory chapter in Crouch and Streeck 1997).
In the late 1960s, Amitai Etzioni (1968) introduced the concept of societal guidance, for
the same subject and with similar intentions. For whatever reason, that concept was not
picked up by others. On how Steuerung was redefined as governance, see Mayntz
(2003).
Interestingly it also came to be adopted by the institutionalist strand of international relations
theory which was looking for a concept by which to suggest the possibility of some sort of
order even in the stateless world of interstate relations where realists see only power and
conflict.
To the extent that students of what they still regard as corporatism are increasingly reconstructing their objects of study as networks this may reflect increased fragmentation and
complexity of organized social groups and the interests they represent.
In Etzionis (1968) terms, this would represent a shift from an active towards a passive
sort of theory, one that has no place for the setting and pursuit of societal goals, which may
either be realized or missed. Not surprisingly, network analysis seems particularly relevant
for the study of sectorally specialized governance arrangements in state-free international
settings, where the production of order is left to a multiplicity of agents that lack both public
power and democratic legitimacy. As decisions emerge ex post from an aggregation of
actions taken independently by a variety of agents, one notes in passing that there is a certain
similarity here to market processes.
For an outstanding representation of this school, see Thelen (1999).
For a recent example of how the substance of collective group interests may vary with the
institutional structure in which they have to be pursued see Woll (2004). An elegant exposition of the contextual malleability of interests as they become translated into operative preferences is given by Hall (2004).
See Hollingsworth, Schmitter and Streeck (1994) and Crouch and Streeck (1997).
Note the interesting parallel with the weaker version of the once budding neo-corporatist
convergence theory which attributed non-convergence on the corporatist pattern to lack of
ability of pluralist countries to converge, expecting them to be punished for it economically.
41
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2. Neo-corporatism and democracy

Colin Crouch
A tension between corporatism in its various forms and democracy has long
been recognized: in the case of authoritarian or state corporatism, obviously
so; in that of societal or neo-corporatism, in more complex ways. The main
argument of this chapter is that, where neo-corporatism is concerned, this
tension is far less important than the support that neo-corporatist arrangements
offer to effective democracy. First, it is necessary to establish that neo-corporatism remains a phenomenon worth discussing in the neo-liberal political
economies that dominate the early twenty-first century world. In fact, a review
of recent contributions to neo-corporatist literature on organized interests and
macroeconomic management suggests both the continuing viability of at least
some of these arrangements and the continuing validity of the original arguments initiated by Philippe Schmitter in the 1970s (Schmitter 1974; Schmitter
and Lehmbruch 1979; Lehmbruch and Schmitter 1982). There have certainly
been changes, but most of these should have been predictable from those arguments and are consistent with the theory. There has been one genuine surprise:
the dependence of some though not all national cases of neo-corporatist
industrial relations arrangements on the manufacturing sector. If such arrangements have in some cases failed to perform their important characteristic of
responding to general, social concerns and not just those of their members
narrowly defined, it is because their institutions have failed to embrace the
particular issues presented by employment in public and private services.
This last point raises the problems of rent-seeking and exclusion that critics of neo-corporatist arrangements have long claimed to be associated with
them, and therefore brings us to the relationship between neo-corporatism and
democracy. Standard claims that non-producer interests, such as ecological
ones, will be advanced more successfully in democracies where neo-corporatist institutions are weak than in those where they are strong will be refuted.
But certain claims that neo-corporatist institutions tend to produce widespread
social exclusion and insider lobbying will be seen to require serious attention.
While in certain cases neo-corporatist institutions have protected insiders at
the expense of large numbers of outsiders (for example, both the well established neo-corporatist structures of Germany and the weak and recently established ones of Spain), this has been far less true of the Nordic countries or the
46
47
Netherlands. Second, problems of insider lobbying are by no means limited to

neo-corporatist cases, and could even be said to be more severe (at least
among employer and business interests) when neo-corporatism is weak. In
conclusion, it will be argued, there is no zero-sum relationship between neocorporatism and formal democracy. Their relationship is mainly orthogonal,
and under certain conditions may even be mutually supportive.
BACKGROUND TO THE DEBATE

When Philippe Schmitter (1974) invited social scientists to consider the
survival of corporatism well into the post-World War II period, he acknowledged a major differentiation within the species. Pre-war corporatism had been
based on authoritarian compulsory structures: organizations that ostensibly
represented interests in fact subordinated them to the priorities of an authoritarian political regime. This kind of corporatism was closely associated with
fascism, and in much of Europe shared its fate, being defeated either by liberal
democracy or state socialism in the outcome of the war. It survived in Portugal
and Spain, which had remained neutral in the war; and in Latin America,
particularly in Argentina, where it developed later. Schmitter was at that time
primarily a Latin American and Hispanophone specialist. However, in what
became the most important part of his contribution to the analysis of organized
interests, he acknowledged the existence in some other places of a very different, liberal form of corporatism that he called societal. Here, labour and
employer organizations cooperated voluntarily at a central level with each
other and with governments, effecting continuous compromises that enabled
them to reap gains for their members without disadvantaging national
economies.
This second form, which is often known as neo-corporatism to distinguish
it from the fascist variety, was mainly associated with the very different political scenario of social democracy. A brief account of how this kind of corporatism operated will explain this association between a fascist form and a
political philosophy rooted in the idea of strong, autonomous labour movements in a context of democracy.1
In a free-market economy, trade unions constantly encounter the problem
that any gains they make for their members will lead to increases in the prices
of the goods and services produced by them, which may reduce demand and
create unemployment. This does not mean that unions can achieve nothing;
even under purely competitive conditions they can pursue various kinds of
rights for their members that do not result directly in higher prices. Also, in the
real world the conditions of the truly free market are frequently absent;
monopolies and oligopolies exist, which restrain supply in order to retain high
48
profits. Unions can bargain for a share in these, and a large part of their activities involves doing precisely this. However, the price constraint and its implications for employment always remain in the background in any market
economy.
During the inter-war years the free-market regime had come under challenge as an economic ideal. It was seen to be associated with major waves of
unemployment and insecure wages, which led to widespread worker protest
and dissatisfaction. The economic depression and mass unemployment of the
1920s and 1930s were linked to social disruption and the rise of both communism and fascism. Political and business leaders sought for means of offsetting
the economic turbulence and somehow smoothing the fluctuations of the
economic cycle. This was partly the concern of existing conservative and
liberal elites, worried about threats to social order, and partly of the emerging
new leadership in the labour movement itself. The main policy response that
emerged was for government to manage aggregate demand in the economy to
smooth the trade cycle. It would accept deficits in the balance between the
taxes it raised and its spending programmes during periods of weak demand,
thereby avoiding recessions; and it would run surpluses to limit excessive
expansion during periods of growth. These policies, known as Keynesian after
the British economist John Maynard Keynes, who developed much of the
theory surrounding them, were first launched in the Scandinavian countries in
the late 1930s, then in the UK and elsewhere in the non-communist industrial
world during or after World War II. It was never universal throughout the
industrial world; Federal Germany in particular tackled the problem in different ways (Matzner and Streeck 1991). However, there was broad consensus
that governments should use various policy instruments to prevent the appearance of major recessions, evidenced primarily in increases in unemployment.
This would however run a major risk. In the democratic climate of the
defeat of fascism, there was also broad agreement that trade unions should be
free to organize labour, inter alia to press for improved wages and conditions.
If governments were more or less guaranteeing to intervene to prevent reductions in aggregate demand, price rises would become general, leading to inflation, from which everyone would suffer. This was the dilemma of the
democratic, full-employment economy to which neo-corporatism was a
response. If union leaders could be induced to respond to the unavoidable
perception of the likely inflationary consequences of their actions, they would
voluntarily exercise restraint, or channel their energies into gains for their
members that did not add to costs. Voluntarily, therefore, and in exchange for
a macroeconomy favourable to their members interests, they would behave as
forces supporting social and economic order something that the authors of
fascist corporatism had instigated through authoritarian means.
But when can leaders of organizations be induced to respond to the
49
unavoidable perception of negative general consequences of the actions they

take to advance their members interests? As Mancur Olson (1982) argued, in
a market economy organizations of particular interests engage in rent-seeking
behaviour: extracting gains for their members from the generality. They will
abstain from this only if their membership is so extensive within the society
concerned (encompassing in Olsons term) that they must internalize any
negative consequences of their action: there is not enough of the society
outside the groups membership on to which negative consequences can be
dumped. For encompassingness to be possible, decision-making would have
to be concentrated in a few hands at the centre of labour organizations, since
only then would the group on behalf of whom decisions were being made
approximate to the generality or overall universe of interested persons. This
has usually been held to imply that only centralized union movements could
be compatible with neo-corporatism establishing another tension between
neo-corporatism and democracy. However, as I have argued elsewhere
(Crouch 1993), within the general context of a democratic society with voluntary associations, centralization can be maintained only when the organizations concerned possess articulated structures. By this I mean structures that
facilitate frequent interaction between the centre and more local levels, during
which the centre learns how far and for what purposes it can rely upon the
loyalty of the periphery.
RECENT CHANGES IN THE PERFORMANCE OF NEOCORPORATIST INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS INSTITUTIONS

The Keynesian model of demand management was tested to destruction in the
commodity price crises of the 1970s. Inflation reached high levels as Western
consumers tried to contest the major shift of resources from their economies to
those of oil-producing nations that was in progress. They fought in various
ways, but prominent among them was tough bargaining by unions to try to
ensure that every rise in the general price level was compensated for by
increases in their members incomes increases which were mainly passed on
in further price rises. This was in fact the high tide of neo-corporatist arrangements: it was in those countries where unions (and employers) were organized
to operate in encompassing ways that their leaders could appreciate the folly of
this spiral. It was in those with powerful unions but lacking encompassing institutions (primarily Italy and the UK) that the situation seemed desperate.
However, sooner or later virtually all governments decided, though to very
different degrees, that the post-World War II policy instruments could no longer
be trusted to keep inflation under control. This challenged both Keynesian
measures as such and the role that had been played by neo-corporatist unions
50
and employers associations, since these had developed in the Keynesian

context. Control of monetary aggregates and an end to the pursuit of full
employment as a direct goal as opposed to a by-product of fiscal and monetary policy proved to be highly effective in reducing inflation. On the one
hand this removed a major task and a major collective good anti-inflationary wage restraint for which successful neo-corporatist institutions could
claim credit. On the other hand, at least for trade unions, this had hardly been
a task of which they had wanted to boast. An ability to control the negative
effects of the successful pursuit of ones main goal is hardly a proud claim. It
also raised the question, asked very seriously in the UK and the USA: if unions
could be rendered sufficiently weak in the first place, their neo-corporatist role
would not be needed.
There was however no general dismantling of neo-corporatist structures
where they had been effective, and the triumph of neo-liberalism over demand
management was less thoroughly practised in reality than in theory. As the
most extensive comparative study of the performances of different kinds of
industrial relations institutions shows (Traxler, Blaschke and Kittel 2001), in
European and some other industrialized countries where they exist, neo-corporatist institutions continue to operate broadly in the manner described above.
This does not mean that there have not been changes; there have, and they
have been major. But the changes should not surprise anyone who had
followed closely the earlier writings; and their effect has mainly been to
weaken the neo-corporatist character of certain empirical organizational structures, not to weaken the performance of neo-corporatist structures as such.
The Shift Away From Inflation as a Policy Concern
First, the agenda of neo-corporatist deals has shifted from inflation to issues of
employment, skills, modernization and changes in labour practices (Pochet
1998; Rhodes 1997). In those countries where neo-corporatist mechanisms had
been strong, unions have accepted a shared agenda with employers to improve
the performance of firms and whole sectors. The exchanges here are complex
and detailed. In general, unions want to insist on their members opportunities
to improve their skill levels, so that their firms can succeed in the global economy without facing wage competition from low-cost, low-skilled countries.
Employers insist on improvements in capital intensity that reduce the numbers
of workers needed to produce a given output, usually involving net staffing
reductions. This changed agenda should have been fully expected given the
changes in the general political and economic agenda and presents no shock to
the neo-corporatist model itself. Indeed, some of the new roles of neo-corporatist bargaining had in fact long been present, such as the improvement of
work skills (Crouch, Finegold and Sako 1999; Streeck 1989).
51
The Shift in the Balance of Power

Second, the context in which this has been happening is very different from
the post-war trente glorieuses. Consequent on the change towards neo-liberalism in dominant economic strategies there have been major changes in the
balance of power within negotiations in favour of employers. In the core
north-western European cases this has involved what Rhodes (1997) has felicitously called competitive corporatism. This is implied in what has been said
immediately above about the global economy. The growing, though by no
means infinite, ability of firms to locate production wherever they chose
across the world while labour remained largely rooted in its national context,
necessarily shifted the balance of power in industrial relations towards
employers. The content of bargaining became increasingly a matter of setting
the terms on which a firm, sector or even a national economy could remain
competitive. Frequently this involved workers accepting a deterioration in
their real wages or working conditions. For example, unions have often
bargained only to compensate their members for increases in inflation, foregoing any claim to a share in increased productivity when this was rising more
rapidly than inflation (Erne 2004). But the competition in competitive corporatism is primarily among Western European countries, as it is only among
these, rather than at a global level, that such marginal adjustments in relative
wages can have significant effect. There have therefore been attempts by
cross-national groups of European unions to prevent what appear to them as
beggar-my-neighbour practices. They have set wage-claim targets of inflation
compensation plus a share in productivity gains. There has been some success
in this, particularly among unions either side of national boundaries (ibid.). A
major example is the metalworking industry around the Belgian, Dutch and
German borders. Even the inflation plus strategy is evidence of a neo-corporatist approach, as it implies that unions should avoid trying to increase
labours share of total income or increasing prices. There is therefore a conflict
between two levels of neo-corporatism: a national competitive corporatism,
and an attempt at a European one.
The Shift Away From the Nation State
This last point has become particularly relevant since the introduction of the
single European currency, which challenges the viability of the nation state as
the prime unit of neo-corporatist decision-making. This, together with globalization in general, marks a third change. Neo-corporatist (and a fortiori
authoritarian corporatist) institutions have always been formulated at national
levels. They have been grouped around national governments and have
involved national associations of capital and labour. More formally, Olsons
52
concept of encompassingness assumes a manageable and definable universe

across which organizations can be said to be encompassing. His theory, and all
others that concern the logic of neo-corporatist stability, hold only to the extent
that there is a relatively bounded universe linking fiscal and monetary policy,
labour markets and labour market organizations, and the scope of firms.
Throughout most of the history of industrial societies the nation state has
provided such a universe, but it becomes eroded as firms become global and
as institutions like the European Union (EU) develop.
Neo-corporatist organizations can respond positively to this kind of situation in two ways. First, they may try to shift their point of activity to a higher
level, to recapture encompassingness. This is what can be seen in the attempts
to create trans-European frameworks for collective bargaining (Erne 2004;
Pochet and Vanhercke 1998). To date these have been extremely weak, and of
course cannot cope with the challenge of full globalization. They also tend to
be one-sided. It is unions that seek them, employers often preferring to avoid
opening new levels that involve negotiation with workers organizations.
However, the fact that the attempts exist demonstrates the continuity of pressures towards neo-corporatism. Second, the shift to levels above the nation
state of many elements of economic regulation paradoxically increases the
incentive of nationally rooted institutions to find new powers for themselves.
Governments, trade unions and smaller firms remain organized primarily at
national levels, and governments and unions have to respond to national
constituencies. They therefore have to develop some capacity to deliver gains
to these constituencies. This is the logic of Rhodess competitive corporatism: using national corporatist structures to improve economic performance at the national level can meet this need. This is an interesting case of
parliamentary democracy (which remains strongest at national levels) sharing
an interest with neo-corporatist structures, where these are sufficiently strong,
in anchoring some elements of economic regulation at the national level.
The Shift to Social Pacts
Fourth, in a number of countries there have been moves towards generalized
social pacts, rather than the technical arrangements about wage increases
and changes in working practices that have characterized northern European
neo-corporatism (Pochet 1998; Schmitter and Grote 1997). Pacts are more
general in terms and cover a range of themes from economic stability to social
peace. They have been prominent in Spain, Portugal and Greece; and after the
fall of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe, they became important
in those countries too suggesting an association between them and recency
of democracy. Pacts have had some continuity with what Pizzorno (1978) had
identified as the process of political exchange surrounding and possibly
53
preceding neo-corporatist deals. Unions could threaten social disruption; therefore, a good that they could offer governments was restraint in the exercise of
that capacity. It is similar to the argument about inflation, and overlaps with it.
And it had the same negative implication of making a good out of restraint in
inflicting a bad. The social pacts of the 1990s and early twenty-first century
have been somewhat different weaker, but less negative. In young and unstable democracies unions could act as general Ordnungsfaktoren, that is,
elements supporting the existing social order, not becoming part of the forces
that might disrupt it. Among the potentially disruptive sources, in both Spain
and in some countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), were often ethnic
or geographical separatisms that could be separated from unions socioeconomic agenda, but under certain circumstances could become merged with
it. In exchange for contributing to general stability, unions in CEE received
little more than an acknowledgement that they were indeed part of
respectable society. However, this was often an important gain in societies
where unions could easily have been ostracized as having been part of the old
state socialist regime. At a time when the prevailing Anglo-American neoliberal order was in any case generally delegitimating the concept of organized
labours institutionalized place in society, this was often valuable.
Neo-corporatist bargaining involving weak unions raises the more general
question why employers and governments (if the latter are involved) should
bother to negotiate at all if unions are weak; why not simply ignore them, as
has been the tendency in parts of British and US industry? One reason is that,
if employers and governments have experienced stable neo-corporatist relations that have produced positive-sum results, they have little incentive to risk
destroying that legacy for what may prove to be a temporary weakening of
organized labours power. This helps explain why countries with successful
neo-corporatist records have tended to retain these institutions, while those
without them have turned aside from attempts to introduce them, producing a
growing diversity of industrial relations systems.
These arguments do not explain the appearance of pacts in countries with
weak unions and no past history of neo-corporatist success. But this phenomenon is not entirely new. In the post-war period there had been union movements with strong institutional entrenchment alongside organizational or
labour-market weakness. This had, for example, been the case with organized
labour in the Federal Republic of Germany in the immediate post-war years.
Unions had been accorded entrenched institutional positions as part of postNazi reconstruction, but until the late 1950s the labour market was very weak
as several million German expellees from Central and Eastern Europe entered
the western part of Germany. Frequently unions could do little other than to try
to ensure by their cooperative behaviour that employers would not try to erode
the formal rights that they had gained. Earlier still, the first steps in both Dutch
54
and Swiss neo-corporatism had taken place in the late 1930s, when the growing threat of major war in Europe led national elites to offer limited incorporation to the leaders of rather weak and non-militant union movements
(Crouch 1993, ch. 5). Even earlier than that, unions had acquired a limited
incorporation in the last years of the Hapsburg empire, when they at least
represented German-Austrian forces in a regime threatened by independence
struggles among its non-German nationalities (1993, ch. 4) often in the very
same parts of central Europe where national governments used a similar
approach in the 1990s.
A Shift From Superior Economic Performance
Fifth, during the late 1990s and the first years of the twenty-first century it
became increasingly difficult to claim superiority of economic performance by
countries with neo-corporatist industrial relations institutions over those without. Germany and some though by no means all neo-corporatist countries
began to demonstrate a weaker economic performance on certain indicators than
the USA and then the UK. (Germany is of course a special case, as this was no
longer the West German republic within which a complex and often ambiguous
set of compromises had developed between unions and employers during the
first four post-war decades, but a new country that had overnight expanded its
population through unification with the impoverished East German state-socialist republic, whose workers had had a completely different set of experiences.)
However, it had always been an error on the part of some writers to claim
that there would necessarily be superior performance by neo-corporatist industrial relations systems (for example Hibbs 1987). There was no warrant for this
in the basic theory. As set out above, the fundamental premise of neo-corporatist arrangements was the avoidance of inflation in situations where labour
was powerfully organized. This says nothing about the performance of market
economies with weak labour (Crouch 1982). If unions were powerful but not
part of neo-corporatist arrangements (as in Italy and the UK in the 1970s), they
were likely to produce inflation or unemployment (depending on the prevailing
fiscal and monetary regime) and restrictive labour practices. In such situations,
neo-corporatism was therefore likely to be more efficient in a narrow economic
sense than what was known as collective laissez faire. But if labour was weak
there were no strong reasons to expect a liberal market economy to underperform a corporatist one. What happened during the last part of the twentieth
century and the first years of the new one was a collapse of union power.
If some neo-corporatist arrangements are acting less effectively than in the
past, it is because some of the necessary infrastructure of effective neo-corporatism has decayed. This returns us to Olsons (1982) argument cited above,
that organized interests will only abstain from rent-seeking behaviour if their
55
membership is so encompassing that they must internalize the negative consequences of their actions. It follows that if socio-economic change erodes the
encompassing character of an organizational system it will cease to operate in
a neo-corporatist way, even if formal attributes and some elements of behaviour remain unchanged. The only problems with Olsons account were: (i) that
he saw encompassingness solely in straightforward statistical terms of proportions of a national labour force represented by a principal central decision
point; and (ii) that he, like most other writers of the period, concentrated on
inflation as the bad that would result from rent-seeking in a Keynesian
context.
In relation to (i) it is important to note that sensitivity to export prices could
act as an incentive to wage restraint in addition to pure encompassingness,
provided unions and employers associations were organized in a manner that
required them to take account of such prices. In particular, organizations representing a whole industrial sector, rather than only some layers of employees
within it, were more likely to take this datum into account (Crouch 1999:
1720). This point shows how neo-corporatism could be effective outside the
very narrow range of cases that Olson envisaged for it. More germane to the
present argument is point (ii). Once, as noted above, the political agenda of
collective bargaining broadened beyond wage negotiation, the bads that could
be produced became more extensive than inflation, and a different logic of
externalization and internalization came into play. For example, and to anticipate an argument that will be developed in more detail below: if employment
creation and/or protection have become major activities of industrial relations
organizations, but if the significant actors within those organizations have
responsibilities only to male workers of certain ethnic backgrounds and age
ranges, they may be content to externalize barriers to employment opportunities to those outside this category. There is not necessarily any change here in
the behaviour of the organizations concerned. What changes is the agenda of
issues, changing in a way that severely challenges the appropriateness for
continued neo-corporatist performance of the nominally neo-corporatist structures concerned. This eventuality should have been predicted by those of us
writing about neo-corporatism up to the 1990s, but in general it was not. The
issue raises important implications for both the operation of neo-corporatism
and for its democratic legitimacy.
SECTORAL CHANGES IN EMPLOYMENT AND

NEO-CORPORATIST INSTITUTIONS
The principal change involved in loss of encompassingness is the shift in
economies from the manufacturing base in which most industrial relations
56
systems are rooted, whether or not they are neo-corporatist, to the servicessector orientation of the early twenty-first century (Castells 1996; Crouch 1999:
ch. 4). Even though manufacturing remains important in all advanced
economies, and for some purposes (such as foreign trade) it remains fundamental, in some other respects it has lost significance. Most important, at least
for present purposes, is employment, where services sectors are now more
prominent, because of their labour-intensive nature. Both manufacturing and
services are subject to constant improvements in productivity: both incremental ones and major technological shocks such as the almost universal use of the
computer and its associated keyboard to perform work tasks ranging from
setting the gauge on a metal-planing machine to presenting diagrams in a
conference paper. But many services depend at some point on the direct presentation of an activity to the customer by another human being. While the replacement of a human action by a mechanized one is nearly always likely to improve
productivity in manufacturing, in services it will at certain points adversely
affect the quality and added value of the product. Teachers, nurses and waiters
are only a few, prominent, examples of service activities where replacement by
a machine could have negative consequences. Further, this argument applies to
certain low-productivity service activities as well as high-productivity ones. It
is for this reason that it is erroneous to see the shift from manufacturing to
services as always an upward shift in skill levels of the workforce. Indeed, as
Scharpf and Schmidt (2000) have argued, the fact that more service activities
than manufacturing ones are not vulnerable to external competition means that
they provide important shelters to low-productivity workers in a period when
globalization primarily means competition from low-wage countries.2
Closely related to this change is a gender issue: manufacturing employment
(with the exception of eastern Europe) and therefore its associated industrial
relations systems have been primarily male affairs. As a result, neo-corporatism has historically often been an overwhelmingly male institution. The
main exception to this has been employment in so-called social and community services, the first services sector to outpace manufacturing in job growth,
where in modern societies a majority of employees is usually female (Crouch
1999: ch. 4). Particularly in Europe, employment in this sector has mainly
been public employment (or has been until recent waves of privatization), and
public employment is particularly strongly unionized usually more so even
than manufacturing (Visser 1987). But the logic of employment relations in
public service differs in many ways from that in private, whether in manufacturing or services. There is no capitalist employer; many public services are
considered to be of particular social importance, so industrial action by public
employees creates direct harm to the public. Because of this, these employees
have often had restricted rights to take part in industrial action; but, partly in
exchange for this, governments have often accepted an obligation to be model
57
employers, and therefore to establish generous standards of union representation. The integration of public service or, more widely, public sector workers
within wider union movements has therefore sometimes been problematic. As
unions representing these workers grew particularly rapidly from the 1970s
onwards, the internal balance of union movements changed. Perhaps even
more important changes took place on the employers side: it is not easy for
the government as employer to become part of the structure of private
employer associations that are the necessary counterparts to unions in an
industrial relations system, corporatist or otherwise.
Then, during the 1980s, employment in other kinds of services began to
grow: business services, distribution, personal services. These were usually in
the private sector, often fairly new as forms of activity, and often in small
firms. They also employed large numbers of women. Here, with some exceptions like banking and insurance, where in any case large, long-established
firms dominated, traditions of union organization were weak and often vigorously contested by employers. The impact of this sector on industrial relations
systems has therefore been minor.
It is by no means necessarily the case that neo-corporatism cannot adjust to
these changes. The Nordic economies in particular have developed forms of it
that are as much able to regulate services sectors as manufacturing and to deal
with the special concerns of female workers as well as male ones. Private as
well as public services have been unionized in a way found in few other countries, gradually enabling the development of an industrial relations system that
includes both. As a result, unions have become responsive to female employees needs, making it easier to recruit even more of them. The high level of
centralization characteristic of the manufacturing model has not been established across the whole with perhaps some gain in flexibility and representativeness at the expense of encompassingness; but a certain minimal level of
that quality has been achieved.
Opposite causes seem to have been associated with a similar responsiveness in the Netherlands. Here weakness seems to have made unions particularly responsive to the need to change and adapt to the new economy (Visser
and Hemerijck 1997). The ratio of services to manufacturing employment in
the Netherlands is particularly high. The level of female labour-force participation had been particularly low, but the existing male-dominated unions
responded to that situation, and encouraged a number of labour-market and
social policies designed to assist female employment. Simplistic arguments
that assert that neo-corporatist structures cannot respond to change therefore
do not seem to be valid. At the same time it is not the case that only neo-corporatist systems can adapt: the British industrial relations system, though not
corporatist, has developed similar abilities to adapt to changing sectoral and
gender composition.
58
Difficulties have been experienced in systems where (unlike the Nordic

cases) the existing system is heavily skewed towards existing strengths in
manufacturing; and where (unlike the Netherlands or the UK) existing institutions have been providing enough rewards to manufacturing insiders not to
give them any incentive to change. The main case here is Germany. The prime
mover of neo-corporatism in the former western Federal Republic was the
existence of major metalworking and chemical industries that derived a large
part of their earnings from exports. Unions organized at the level of the industrial branch accepted shared responsibility for the competitiveness of these
industries, as their members jobs and their own organizational presence
depended on them. The organizations representing these industries dominated
the world of employer associations and unions; and the general state of the
economy also depended on them too. Therefore, an organization that was
encompassing in these industries was more or less encompassing to the
national economy. This was encompassingness through export sensitivity, as
mentioned above. But it was not full encompassingness.
This scenario has changed in uneven ways during the past decade or more.
Unions have continued to cooperate in the pursuit of efficiency and competitiveness in the export industries, but on the assumption of a high-wage model.
In a context of globalization, this has been achievable only through a major
replacement of labour by technology. Job creation becomes possible only
outside these industries, mainly in services sectors. But these remain outside
the parameters of the logic of the industrial relations system; their needs
neither affect that system, nor is the system involved in their operation. The
differences are further reinforced by demographic characteristics. As noted,
the manufacturing industries in Germany, as everywhere else, primarily
employ male workers. Given that employment is declining within the sector,
its workers are relatively old. They are also primarily ethnic Germans from the
territories of the former western republic. Women, young workers, ethnic
minorities and East Germans are only weakly represented by the neo-corporatist industrial relations system. Without really affecting the way it behaves in
its own terms, this sector has therefore ceased to be encompassing, but looks
only to the interests of its insiders. The main consequence is an absence of
policies and practices likely to create employment for the outsider groups.
A similar situation prevails in Spain, but for different reasons. This is
hardly a neo-corporatist case. Spanish labour acquired freedom from fascism
only in the mid-1970s, at the moment when the classic post-war model was
encountering difficulties elsewhere in Europe. The country remains relatively
poor by the standards of Western Europe, and outside agriculture it has developed few points of excellent economic performance. Unions remain very weak
in membership terms. However, it was an important achievement of Spanish
democracy and a contrast with the fascist period that unions should be
59
autonomous, powerfully embedded in the system, and possessing extensive

rights. The consequence of this contrast between the state of the economy and
the level of union rights has been that the industrial relations system can
protect only a minority of workers, who become insiders at the expense,
mainly, of the younger generation. The main institutional expression of this
dualism is the temporary work contract. Those who manage to acquire the few
secure jobs that the system can provide enjoy very advanced employment
rights. Those outside are mainly on temporary contracts, from which they are
rarely able to move into the secure sector.
Where a neo-corporatist system extends its membership to sectors that
continue to grow, it will continue to operate in a positive way, because the
conditions for encompassing are still being met. Or, in the Dutch or British
cases, when unions fear that they will be victims of exclusion, they have an
interest in becoming inclusive. On the other hand, once a neo-corporatist
system has begun to protect insiders only and has no capacity for self-extension to new sectors and types of worker, it is likely that only threatened
marginalization could provide its internal actors with changed incentives.
These incentives are asymmetrical in that unions require an institutionalized industrial relations system if they are to have any serious role, while
employers do not. Firms can bargain and lobby governments without the intermediary role of associations if necessary; indeed, they may prefer it, as the
lobbying may bring direct rewards for an individual company in the form of
government contracts. There is no equivalent to this on the labour side. The
marginalization and contraction of the system is therefore always an option for
employers. The US and British cases show this most clearly, but the German
and Swedish systems have seen similar strategies advocated by business interests (Myrdal 1991; BDI 1989). For employers to remain supportive of any
institutionalized industrial relations system, including a neo-corporatist one, it
has to provide them with bargaining returns that are more secure than those
they might achieve from unilateral action.
Some conclusions may be drawn from these changes and the diversity
among them. Where a neo-corporatist system becomes one of insider protection, it still offers some general gains that give political authorities some
incentive to retain it, or at least not to challenge it fundamentally. First, the
gains that it continues to deliver to the sectors and parts of the labour force
where it operates may still be considered to be worth having, especially if
those sectors themselves are still important. This is probably the case with the
German metal-goods and chemical industries. In that sense therefore the
system is not, strictly speaking, one of pure insiderism some general public
goods are still being delivered.
Second, and more negatively, the capacity for disruption that the insiders
might cause if fundamentally challenged might be judged to constitute a heavy
60
cost in its own right whether to a perceived public good or (more narrowly)
to the convenience of the political class. This is a kind of public good, the kind
considered by Pizzorno (1978) and discussed above. However, if that is all that
is being offered, it is likely that powerful political and economic actors outside
labours ranks will resent this kind of contrived public good and seek opportunities for dispensing with the need for it (as happened in the UK in the
1980s).
Third, insider-serving neo-corporatist systems are highly vulnerable to the
charge that they are hostile to democracy. Not only do they ensure that excessive priority is given to the interests of minority sectors, but they actually
inhibit the interests of those (sectors, genders, generations, ethnic groups) not
represented within them. A national economy will suffer from an incapacity to
generate new sectors, suggesting a tendency to stagnation implicit in neocorporatism, if it loses a capacity for encompassingness. Neo-corporatism
presents newcomers with serious entry barriers. A new interest has to be
accepted as somehow eligible, not just of representation, but even of definition. New economic activities often find it difficult to be defined in a way that
enables them to form an association and have this listened to. But some other
sectors, and certainly excluded social categories, even if excluded from the
corporatist system itself, have chances to operate in other power fields, especially normal politics.
CORPORATISM AND FORMAL DEMOCRACY

It is on this last issue that we shall concentrate here. Ambiguities in the relationship between neo-corporatism and democracy have already been implied.
At one level, neo-corporatism is somehow part of the same family as something far more authoritarian; at another, it has been part of the development of
democracy. There is a further tension between neo-corporatism and the formal
democracy of elected parliaments and governments. Neo-corporatism, it is
argued, can represent only existing producer interests. It can represent only
existing sectors, because only industries that already exist can generate the
kinds of organization trade unions, employers associations, trade associations which are the building blocks of its representative structures. It represents only producer interests because these are the only ones that can manage
industrial relations and other production and trade issues. Formal democracy,
it is further argued, is subject to no such constraints; new issues, interests and
identities may emerge at any time within its more fluid structures, and they can
be based on any kind of subject at all, not just those related to work and economy. Therefore, the more that the democratic political system has to share
power with a neo-corporatist economic representation system, the less flexible
61
and responsive, the less open to new issues and to non-producer issues a polity
will be.
This theoretical argument is open to verification. It would, for example,
contend that environmental and ecological interests will achieve far more
progress within countries where non-corporatism is weak than where it is
strong. In fact, the opposite is the case. On almost all indicators of environmental policy, the Nordic countries, Germany and the Netherlands all more
or less neo-corporatist are world leaders; the USA, the prime exemplar of
non-corporatism, is a laggard. This suggests that strong neo-corporatist structures do not necessarily interfere with democratic political channels, but may
at least be orthogonal to them and at best be supportive of them.
This conclusion justifies a more nuanced approach to the relationship
between neo-corporatism and democracy. First, neo-corporatist structures may
sometimes be able to demonstrate a technical capacity to achieve goals shared
by the parliamentary system but which the institutions of that system itself
cannot achieve. This is in fact their main legitimation and describes the earlier
role of neo-corporatism in making possible non-inflationary full employment.
Second, in some cases the democratic system may demonstrate a more
profound incapacity to realize its own task of goal-setting, particularly in situations of parliamentary deadlock. This was frequently the case in Belgium in
the 1950s and 1960s, and in Italy in the early 1990s. Third, democratic structures may themselves face some legitimacy challenges as a result of corruption (as often in Italy), or weak establishment (as in the deals noted above in
relation to Spain and central Europe). In such cases parliamentary democracy
may be grateful to borrow the legitimacy of the neo-corporatist system, even
if the latter is not particularly effective. Not only have weak unions been grateful to have the legitimacy of participating in a social pact, even if that brings
them little in the way of substantive gains, but governments in weakly established democracies are grateful for an association with trade unions, which
have important roots in the society. Similar principles apply to the cultivation
of relations with both unions and employers and trade associations by the
institutions of the EU. By building direct links with these, the Union tries both
to entrench itself among non-governmental organizations at national level
and to establish the rudiments of a European civil society.
However, the declining capacity of some neo-corporatist systems to represent the whole productive system the basis of its own legitimacy and claim
to usefulness becomes a very severe weakness indeed, raising a new element
in the argument concerning the relationship to democracy. Particularly at a
time when democratically elected government seems to be growing across the
world, while neo-corporatism is languishing even within its Western European
heartland, the question must arise: is it not time for these latter institutions to
be consigned to the dustbin of history, along with many other structures which
62
seemed important during the high tide of industrialism, but which are becoming increasingly marginal in a post-industrial society? It might linger on
successfully in a few places, but these are just the anomalies that history
always includes.
FORMAL DEMOCRACY UNDER SCRUTINY

But a sociologist or an empirically minded political scientist can never be
content with the formal properties of institutions. It is necessary to subject the
claims of formal (particularly parliamentary) democracy itself to a similar
substantive critique as that to which neo-corporatism has been submitted.
After all, corporatism can be made to appear formally universal through the
establishment of legally perfect but substantively vacuous systems of the kind
that Mussolini, Franco, Salazar and other fascist rulers erected in the inter-war
decades. Seen in the perspective of a critique of formalism, current democratic practice is vulnerable to criticisms as withering as those to which neocorporatism is becoming subject.
Parliamentary democracy can make three great claims. First, while the
perfect formal equality of universal suffrage never implies true equality of
political influence, it does require political leaders to appeal to and submit
themselves to a judgement comprising all actual and potential interests and
identities to be found among the citizens of the political unit concerned. This
aggregation of so many different interests amounts to an appeal to a general,
collective, public interest. In contrast, neo-corporatist and other interest associations need appeal only to a membership base. Second, universal suffrage
implies a potential capacity for new interests and identities to shape and
express themselves, and to gain political voice (in the sense of lobbying for
political attention) as a result of that autonomous process. Unlike in neocorporatist contexts, there are no official gatekeepers. Particularly notable in
recent decades, for example, has been the capacity of identities concerned with
sexual orientation to achieve political expression in many countries.
Third, democratic party politics involves permanent open, transparent,
public struggle between governments and their opponents, which places a
premium on openness and the identification and articulation of conflict. In
contrast, neo-corporatist organizations are not engaged in a conflict where one
side is trying to replace the other. They therefore have to do deals with each
other, and conflict is expressed in compromises reached between them, not in
the replacement of one group by another. This usually leads them to prefer to
keep their disputes and even their discussions private, even secret. Only at
extreme moments do they call on a wider mobilization of supporters something that political parties are preparing for every day. Similarly, they do not
63
articulate visions of what they are trying to achieve, but operate technocratically (Erne 2004). They may carry an historical legacy of visions constructed
before they entered the neo-corporatist arena, but they have little capacity to
renew these in the same way, and they are at risk of gradually becoming
outdated.
However, the attractive attributes of political democracy can be heavily
compromised in empirical systems in ways that have relevance for the
comparison between them and neo-corporatist structures. Quite significantly,
some of these weaknesses are likely to be exceptionally severe when the organization of interests within the society concerned departs from an encompassing neo-corporatist pattern. This is interesting, as it suggests a strong limit to
the frequently assumed zero-sum relationship between corporatism and
democracy. Two important current weaknesses of political democracy in many
advanced nations are especially relevant to this issue:
the capacity of insider elites and producer lobbies to secure far greater
influence than those interests that have to rely on the public political
system;
the possibility that whole classes, interests or geographical areas may
lack the means to secure effective as opposed to formal representation.
Lobbies and Democracy
The principal legitimacy and claim to democratic quality of those regimes in
which governments at various levels are elected is of course the electoral
process itself. Although this is not the subject of the present chapter, its importance must not be forgotten. But following in the train of the idea of formal
electoral democracy come other important democratic qualities. As already
noted, because political authorities have to be elected, they also have to make
themselves available to both open and private lobbying; they have to produce
and receive information, also often publicly, relevant to that process; and citizens have to be free to form lobbying organizations and to try to draw attention to themselves in a way that government cannot ignore. A formal electoral
democracy that lacked these other components would be a very weak one,
lacking vitality and activism among the citizens, whose role would be reduced
to just voting when elections were declared.
According to some forms of democratic theory, political parties play a
particular role in relating political decision-makers to these social interests. It
is in their differential attraction to and of interests and identities that parties
derive the characteristics that distinguish them from each other in a way that
makes meaningful democracy possible. One of the means by which interests
lobby political authorities is therefore as insiders to one or sometimes more
64
than one party. In some ways this is the most legitimate form of pure politics.
Lobbies, interests and identities work through the parties; the parties present
themselves for election; the voters choose which part(y)(ies) they prefer, and
during a particular electoral period the interests associated with that party or
those parties achieve(s) the most political influence. There has been a democratic (in the sense of majoritarian) legitimation of that particular cluster of
interests.
However, from some other points of view, this purely partisan pattern of
interest representation lacks democratic quality. Pure majoritarianism leaves
minority interests completely neglected, at least until the next election. And
some interests and identities are doomed to permanent minority status (for
example demographically defined categories, like ethnic, religious or possibly
generational groups). This legitimates the idea that political conflict does not
stop after an election, but defeated groups can continue to lobby, to press, to
argue, possibly even to coerce governments. From some points of view this
constitutes a richer democracy: there are no permanent majorities and minorities; conflict, argument and information exchange continue; elements of the
public try to expand the range of political weapons available to them.
This is what we see in most systems that are worth calling democratic. It is
however vulnerable to criticisms of the kind launched by electoral or parliamentary purists. The equality of the ballot box, one citizen one vote, has been
lost. Power resources of a potentially unlimited and unregulable kind can be
used; political majorities may even find that minorities defeat them by wielding some of these resources to which access is extremely uneven. The most
difficult of such resources are economic wealth and physical violence.
Political systems usually develop some rules about the use of both these,
though they are far stricter about the latter than the former. But of course, the
framing of these rules is carried out by political actors who are themselves
endogenous to the patterns of power at stake. That is, they are themselves
products of the system in restraint of which they are expected to regulate.
There can therefore be no formal guarantees that extremely skewed influence will be excluded from a democratic political system. And the more that
such practices dominate, the weaker become the claims of that system to
democratic superiority over neo-corporatism. Exactly the same difficulties that
beset corporatism in terms of entry barriers blocking access to resources and
capacity to be heard apply to the system of lobbies which is endemic possibly necessary to the democratic political process, even if it finds no place in
formal democratic theory. In fact, the more a system of interest representation
departs from a neo-corporatist form, the worse such distortions become. This
is true for the following reason. Where a more or less formal system of organized interest representation (that is, neo-corporatism) exists, it must (like the
rules of electoral democracy) follow certain procedures of balance, defined
65
access channels, openness of information. If the system becomes entirely

informal, as in contestative lobbying, no such rules apply. This fact was very
openly and honestly stated by both Swedish and German industrial representatives during the 1990s as reasons for seeking to dismantle the corporatist
strictures of their countries where labour-market issues were concerned
(Myrdal 1991; BDI 1989). As long as the neo-corporatist structures existed,
labour interests had to be offered similar rights as themselves. If these structures could be torn down, they could enter a system like that which they saw
as prevailing in the USA, where business could use its superior material
resources to achieve a far higher level of influence.
But these German and Swedish business spokesmen were themselves
representatives of organizations, and they spoke for broadly organized business groups. More important in recent years has been the rise of individual
corporations as lobbyists, bargaining with either their own or foreign governments, or the EU, for privileges. (For a study of the role of individual firms in
lobbying the European Commission, see Coen 1996.) Where, as in the UK,
business associations become very weak, government uses individual firms as
its interlocutors with business. But these, in addition to working for their
sector, region or whatever, will automatically also seek to develop privileged
access for their own corporate purposes, for example developing contacts that
can be used to secure government contracts. Ironically, although an economy
of individual firms without access to associations is in principle more compatible with an idealized free-market economy than one with associations, in
practice it is likely to be the other way round as soon as the lobbying of
governments is permitted. When lobbying is through associations, there is a
level playing field among firms, an important condition of the market economy. Once there are privileged insider firms, the free market has been compromised.
These factors will be particularly important if the open political system is
itself not producing a wider diversity of interests seeking influence through
party links or more public campaigns. In that case, firms will be among the
few active political interests. At the present time there are reasons to believe
that this is the case.
The Declining Class Base of Democratic Politics
The same changes considered above that weakened the encompassingness of
many union movements also weakened democracy in its more than formal
sense, that is, when diverse groups and organizations of ordinary people share
actively in the task of framing a political agenda which will respond to their
concerns. The powerful interests that dominate undemocratic societies are
then wrong-footed and thrown on the defensive; the political system has not
66
quite discovered how to manage and manipulate the new demands. Popular
political movements and parties themselves may well be dominated by boss
figures whose personal style is anything but democratic; but they are at least
subject to lively active pressure from a mass movement which itself in turn
represents something of the aspirations of ordinary people.
In most of Western Europe and North America such a period emerged at the
moment described above, some time between the late 1930s and the 1940s,
when economic policy began to respond to the interests of working people.
For the first time in the history of capitalism, the general health of the economy was seen as depending on the prosperity of the mass of wage-earning
people. This was clearly expressed in the economic policies associated with
Keynesianism, but also in the logic of the cycle of mass production and mass
consumption embodied in so-called Fordist production methods. In those
industrial societies which did not become communist, a certain social compromise was reached between capitalist business interests and working people. In
exchange for the survival of the capitalist system and the general quietening
of protest against the inequalities it produced, business interests learned to
accept certain limitations on their capacity to use their power. And democratic
political capacity concentrated at the level of the nation state was able to guarantee those limitations, as firms were largely subordinate to the authority of
national states.
The high level of widespread political involvement of the early post-war
years was partly a result of the intensely important and public task of post-war
reconstruction and, in a few countries, also a residue of the intensified public
character of life during war itself. As such it could not be expected to be
sustained for many years. Elites soon learned how to manage and manipulate.
People became disillusioned, bored or preoccupied with the business of everyday life. The growing complexity of issues after the major initial achievements
of reform made it increasingly difficult to take up informed positions, to make
intelligent comment or even to know what side one was on. Participation in
political organizations declined almost everywhere, and eventually there was
a decline in electoral turnout (Lane and Ersson 1999: 141). Nevertheless the
basic democratic imperatives of an economy dependent on the cycle of mass
production and mass consumption sustained by public spending maintained
the main policy impetus of the mid-century moment until the mid-1970s.
By the late 1980s the global deregulation of financial markets had shifted
the emphasis of economic dynamism away from mass consumption and on to
stock exchanges. First in the USA and the UK, but soon spreading in eager
imitation, the maximization of shareholder value became the main indicator of
economic success (Dore 2000). Meanwhile, the manual working class in
manufacturing industry that had been the primary impetus of mass democratic
pressure began to decline in size. As discussed above, with the exception of
67
public employees, the new classes that began to replace it in the services
sectors have not acquired a capacity to organize themselves and express their
concerns in the same way. Further, while both the demos and the political elite
remain primarily defined at the level of nation states, economic decisionmaking is becoming globalized. National laws and national representational
systems (whether parliamentary or neo-corporatist) fail to keep pace with the
levels at which economic activity can be regulated. Even if new political agendas are formed by active democratic participation, there is reduced scope for
their operation. Democracys economic reach is becoming reduced.
In these circumstances, formation of the political agenda increasingly
becomes the task of a professional political elite, for which task it is equipped
with techniques derived from the marketing of products. As the population
loses interest in its activities, this elite has to spend more and more on attracting its attention. It therefore turns increasingly for funding to the corporate
sector. This does not lose interest in the polity, as firms always have opportunities for doing business with government departments. Irrespective of its
formal political colour, a major political party becomes increasingly centred
on circles of professional advisors and corporate lobbyists.
It should be noted that the decline of capacity for autonomous political
expression seems limited to economic or class identities representing lower
social categories. In other respects the present time is a particularly rich one
for innovation in interest and identity definition and mobilization. See, for
example, the achievements of environmental, feminist, racist, ethnic and antiglobalization movements in recent years, some of which are described by
Donatella della Porta elsewhere in this volume. This gives us a paradoxical
result. The potential successors to the subordinate identities that had been
reasonably well represented by both the party and the neo-corporatist systems
of the mid- to late twentieth century are today finding it hard to achieve representation in either sphere. Meanwhile, other non-elite interests that had found
neo-corporatist representation difficult are enjoying success in the formal
polity and its associated lobbies. However, in this terrain they are at a considerable disadvantage to far better funded organized economic interests.
CONCLUSIONS: SHARED PROBLEMS OF

NEO-CORPORATISM AND DEMOCRACY
Della Portas arguments also raise questions about the appropriate form of
interest organization in early twenty-first century society. It has been noted by
several observers (for example, Beck 1986; Giddens 1994, 1998) that the institutions of twentieth century labour mirrored those of the Fordist economy:
heavy, centralized structures producing basic, undifferentiated goods. There
68
are basic similarities between, on the one side, the production line of a large
factory and its quantities of identical mass consumption goods, and, on the
other, Keynesian macro-management, the welfare state and neo-corporatist
bargaining. Centralization and undifferentiated products are not essential
characteristics of the organizations and political preferences of lower social
categories; they were the form they took when capitalism took that form. It
should follow that if capitalism takes new forms, so should responses to it.
This is made difficult by the extreme diversity of early twenty-first century
capitalism. For observers like Giddens or Leadbeater (1999), who see it as a
set of light, flat, non-hierarchical flexible structures, its characteristics and
contrast with the past are clear. But they do not see the size and complexity of
global corporations. If corporate structures seem light and flat, this is achieved
by highly complex financial operations and subcontracting chains that in reality signify very strong concentrations of power. This poses a major organizational challenge for the organization of labour interests and, more generally,
the capacity of democracy to match the challenge of corporate power. At one
level the fragmentary, decentralized structures of the movements that della
Porta describes seem both an appropriate counter to post-modernist capitalism
and a means by which a post-corporatist associational form can respond to the
interests that are tending to be excluded by many neo-corporatist systems. But
capitalism does not fragment itself to the point where it loses the capacity to
act strategically.
For both neo-corporatism and political democracy the key substantive
issues are: how can they combine responsiveness to emerging popular
concerns with an ability to regulate the global economy? And how complete
and balanced can their coverage of the whole population be? Here we can
identify major weaknesses in several respects the same weaknesses in
both. At the same time, abolition of neither would improve the situation. This
is obvious for political democracy: its absence brings arbitrary power and
worse corruption than can occur with it provided the defects are not so great
that it becomes simply a legitimatory cover. An abolition of neo-corporatism,
on the other hand, is frequently and openly advocated. But similar arguments
apply: interest organizations, at least of business, will always exist in a democratic capitalist society. Removing their neo-corporatist base simply legitimates the exclusion of the less powerful interests: in present economic
conditions, those of labour. As argued, it also avoids the need to provide a level
playing field of political influence not just between capital and labour, but
among firms themselves.
Far from there being a zero-sum relationship between corporatism and
political democracy, there are synergies between them. And, although both can
be seen as checks on the market, in fact their mutual strength provides best
guarantees for elements of its proper functioning. If political democracy is
69
strong, governments and parties ought to be able to intervene to check the

development of exclusionary practices by neo-corporatism. If neo-corporatism
is strong, its associations should be able to limit privileged lobbying. If these
corrections are not being exercised, it is because there are weaknesses in both
parliamentary and associational democracy, and because the challenges
presented to both by globalized capitalism are severe.
NOTES
1.
2.
As a concept, rather than as a political practice, corporatisms roots are different again. It
developed in the late nineteenth century as a response of modernizing conservatives to the
conflict between capitalists and labour movements.
This happens because of the characteristic already mentioned: many (though by no means all)
services have to be offered directly by a person to the customer. French people can easily take
advantage of low Chinese wages by buying shoes made in China and sent to shops in France;
they are less likely to send their children to school in China. In principle, immigration from
poorer countries to work in the services sectors of rich ones offsets this, but the impact of this
is limited by: (a) the fact that it is more difficult to effect long-term movements of human
beings than of objects, and (b) by the reality of immigration controls.
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3. From corporatist unions to protest

unions? On the (difficult) relations
between organized labour and new
social movements
Donatella della Porta
Autumn 2003, Florence. The drivers of the public (but now semi-private)
transport body, ATAF, participate en masse in a wildcat strike. Following
the example of their Milanese colleagues, the Florentine drivers use a
disruptive (even illegal) form of protest to put pressure on national and
local governments to have their national contract renewed, the previous one
having expired in 1999. Nine strike calls issued by the official unions,
following the rules on strikes in the public services established in 1990
(Law no. 146), remain unanswered. In an open criticism of the official trade
unions (La Repubblica, 15 December 2003) a high percentage of drivers in
various Italian cities challenge both the orders of the prefect (precettazione)
that have defined the strikes as illegal and the high fines imposed, refusing
to take out buses and underground trains. Several wildcat strikes follow,
finally resulting in the contract renewal on 20 December 2003. Wildcat
strikes are accompanied by other forms of protest, such as driving under a
banner: Precettato ma non domato [You can force us to work, but you
wont tame us], refusing to check tickets, following traffic regulations to
the letter in order to slow down traffic (La Repubblica, 16 January 2004).
In addition, ATAF customers, organized in a network of citizens in support
of public transport workers, organize a ticket strike to express their solidarity with the drivers. The wave of protest is decided by workers assemblies, with the encouragement of the critical union COBAS (comitati di
base), which gains a lot of support in the course of the protest (160 of the
800 ATAF drivers became members), while many former members abandon
the official unions. Unexpectedly, the strikes receive significant support
from public opinion; journalists report on a general mood we are all public
transport drivers (La Repubblica, 14 January 2004). Judicial proceedings
are initiated against the workers for interruption of public service as well
as violation of Law 146/1990. The government asks the public transport
71
72
enterprises to implement the 516-euro fine per day of strike, which this law
has established.
In several respects, this protest wave I shall refer to as an illustrative case
in this chapter reflects certain challenges to neo-corporatist tendencies and
concertation in industrial relations, linking labour politics and social movements. Although not a neo-corporatist country, Italy had witnessed a trend in
the early 1990s towards trilateral (business, labour and state) concertation,
perceived by technical and centre-left governments as a necessity in order
to implement economic austerity measures and enter the EMU. This development of concertation in Italy could be understood as convergence towards
a European model of industrial relations (Regini 1999), often emphasized in
EU documents. If the Florentine strikers explicitly criticized concertation,
their behaviour can also be seen as an unforeseen consequence of this development in industrial relations, and points to linkages between unions and
movements.
These linkages are the subject of this chapter. There are two basic,
partially opposed, ways of looking at these conceptual and empirical interactions: either to see social movements as reactions to the taming of labour
movement, or at any rate as very different from unions; or to see them as
embedded in interest politics. Unions active in a neo-corporatist setting have
in particular been seen as representing functional interests in a narrow way,
characterized by a tendency towards monopolistic representation and
frequent use of trilateral concertation. Social movements are different from
neo-corporatist organizations as far as their modus operandi is concerned:
they are mainly pluralistic, loose networks, with little formalized access to
decision-makers and, according to most definitions, mainly characterized by
their use of protest as a political resource of the powerless (Lipsky 1965).
In Tillys (1978) words, movements are challengers, while neo-corporatist
actors are polity members.
Not by chance has the social movement literature systematically and
explicitly contrasted new social movements (NSM) with old-style labour. The
early research on movements developed in the 1970s in Europe from within
labour studies (in which influential NSM scholars such as Alberto Melucci,
Claus Offe and Alain Touraine were involved) certainly stressed the differences between the emerging actors and the old unions they were supposed to
supplant. A network structure, strong solidarity, the use of disruptive repertoires of action, and conflictual aims were among the main characteristics of
the new movements; bureaucratic and hierarchical organizations, representation of interests, concerted decision-making, and compromise seemed to
permeate more and more the labour movement.
Moreover, it was observed that the more influential interest groups are, the
smaller the space for relatively unorganized movements will be since
From corporatist unions to protest unions?
73
a well-resourced, coherently structured, and professionalized system of interest

groups may also be able to prevent outside challengers from having access to the
state. Moreover, highly institutionalized, encompassing arrangements of policy
negotiations between the public administration and private interest associations will
be both quite inaccessible to challengers and able to act. (Kriesi et al. 1995, p. 31).
According to this point of view, neo-corporatism with monopolistic,

centralized interest representation (Schmitter 1974) and concerted decisionmaking (Lehmbruch 1977) should reduce the incidence of protest. Access to
the institutional system of public decision-making would facilitate agreement
between different social groups and the state without the need for non-institutional forms of collective action. Both control over the formation of social
demands (Schmitter 1981) and the capacity to satisfy those demands (Nollert
1995) discourage protest. In fact, it is especially where neo-corporatist assets
have developed that industrial relations appear as more pacified: as one of the
leading figures of neo-corporatist studies, Philippe Schmitter (1974, 1992),
demonstrated, neo-corporatism and protest have been inversely correlated
the strongest effects of concertation being to reduce strikes and public-order
disturbances.
Although they have different degrees and forms, neo-corporatism and
concertation could be seen in fact as an advanced stage in an evolutionary
progression towards the institutionalization of the labour movement, which
has among its consequences a separation between the two fields of interest
politics and social movements. Kitschelt has suggested that in post-Fordist
society we are moving towards an increasing differentiation in the modes of
collective interest mobilization:
Parties focus increasingly on electoral competition, at the expenses of interest group
representation or social movement protest actions. Interest groups try to set themselves apart from the arena of electoral politics as well as disruptive street politics.
Social movements, finally, concentrate on public actions outside the institutionalised arena of bargaining to affect public opinion and political elite through the
media. (2003, p. 97)
Union politics (even within neo-corporatist assets) can be considered,

however, as conceptually and empirically less hostile to movements and
movement politics as a new form of interest representation. First, in many
European countries, the trade unions are often important allies for emerging
actors, such as the student movement or the womens movement. With a large
social base and very often privileged channels of access to institutional decision-makers (both directly through the public administration and indirectly
through the political parties) the trade unions can increase the mobilization
capacities and chances of success for social movements. In fact, the weaker the
institutional recognition of workers representatives in the workplace and the
74
decision-making process, the greater seems to be their propensity to assume a

political role, allying themselves with social movements and taking part in
public protest (della Porta and Diani 2005, ch. 8; on Southern Europe: della
Porta, Valiente and Kousis forthcoming).
If a neo-corporatist structure undoubtedly reduces strikes in industry,1 its
effect on protest in other sectors is far from clear. In fact, guaranteeing privileges to powerful interests could lead to rebellion by their weaker rivals and
thus to the rise of powerful new movements (Brand 1985).2 Schmitter himself
had indeed expected that neo-corporatism, as an asset privileging strong
economic interest groups, could result in the growth of other movements of
protest, increasing the differences between insiders and outsiders. On the other
hand, neo-corporatism could as easily create a tendency to incorporate emerging groups within the structure of concerted policy-making. A comparison
between the American and German anti-nuclear movements revealed that the
American system, with its multiple points of access and traditionally weak
executive, favoured legal strategies and pragmatic movements. The initial
closure of the German state (traditionally assertive of its supremacy over civil
society) towards interests that cut across its corporatist outlook, on the other
hand, favoured strategies of direct action (Joppke 1993). However, once new
issues and interests pass the high hurdles of party and parliament, the German
polity firmly institutionalises them (Joppke 1993, p. 201). Moreover, neocorporatist states (for instance the Scandinavian ones) do not seem to co-opt
only strong interests; state sponsoring and concertation usually spread to environmental or womens issues (Dryzek et al. 2003). State sponsoring of environmental organizations and their involvement in the concertation of public
decisions have tended to develop in neo-corporatist regimes (such as Sweden
and Germany) rather than in statist ones (France) or pluralist ones (Italy and
the UK) (della Porta and Diani 2004, ch. 3).
In fact, movement organizations also represent interests, often interacting
with unions. In the eighties and nineties, research described a progressive
institutionalization of social movements, at least in Western democracies. In
this sense, the labour movement was not alone on a path of growing organizational structuration. Some movement organizations had become better structured, at national or even supranational level; had acquired substantial material
resources and a certain public recognition; had set up paid staffs thanks to
mass membership drives; and had tended to replace protest with lobbying or
concertation. They had, that is, become interest groups, albeit of a publicinterest type. Other groups, involved in the process of contracting out social
services, had entered the third sector, acquiring professionalism and often
administering public resources, similarly with little recourse to unconventional political action. Protest had in the meantime become the heritage of citizen committees, often fragmented down to street or neighbourhood level, with
75
pragmatic objectives of protecting limited territories. Even squatted youth

centres seemed caught between commercialization in administering spaces for
alternative culture and radicalization of forms of action (della Porta 2003).
At the turn of the millennium, several trends produce a rapprochement
between not only labour and the new social movements activists, but also
between scholars in the two fields. Surprisingly, however, researchers did not
look to the institutionalization of social movements, but rather to the development of social movement unions. More or less explicitly, researchers of labour
unions started to identify some signs of new life after the decline in union
membership and strikes in the 1990s had heralded, if not the death of the
labour organizations, at least their chronic sickness. In many ways, it seems
that, in this domain as in others, some of the strategies, organizational structures and identity definitions are more reminiscent of the first emergence of
the labour movement than of its full development in the neo-corporatist era.
As Beverly Silver (2003) has summarized, while many scholars stress the
growing weakness of the unions relating it to capital hypermobility, de facto
decline of national sovereignty (for example, Castells 1997), or post-Fordist
fragmentation of labour (Jenkins and Leicht, pp. 3789) others take a different view. They observe that, as happened with Fordism, that had been initially
considered as a source of inevitable defeat for the working class, post-Fordism
too would present both challenges and opportunities for the workers organizations. The intertwining of movement politics and interest politics is reflected
in the emergence of concepts such as movement unions or unions from
below (Tait 2005; Tilly 2004).
In what follows, I shall reflect on these issues, focusing on recent developments in both labour politics and social movements, especially on their interactions in the so-called global justice movement (Andretta et al. 2002, 2003;
della Porta et al. forthcoming). A characteristic of this movement is, in fact, the
involvement of trade unions side-by-side with other social movement actors.
In the global justice movement, unions act according to different logics than
those prevailing in neo-corporatist agreements: they protest more than act in
concert, they build horizontal networks with other movements instead of relying upon hierarchical organization, and they construct encompassing collective identities instead of focusing on the defence of economic interests.
I shall proceed by summarizing some research findings and reflections on
these issues, referring by way of illustration to two pieces of my own research.
One is based upon a series of case studies of recent instances of contention
over labour issues in Italy, including protest by the unemployed and precarious workers, actions against dismissals or factory relocations, and the like. In
order to single out certain new trends in labour politics, I shall report here in
particular on a case study (based on press accounts and interviews) of the wildcat strike staged by the drivers of the Florentine public transport system,
76
mentioned above. A second source is a survey of participants in the first

European Social Forum, held in Florence in November 2002. During the days
of the ESF, we administered some 2,400 questionnaires, translated into
English, French, Spanish and German, to Italian as well as non-Italian
activists, distributing the interviews over the various initiatives (theme-based
piazzas, debates, and so on), in order to construct a representative sample of
the various souls of the movement. The issues touched upon in the questionnaire concerned associative experiences, forms of political participation,
confidence in the institutions and identification with the movement.3 I shall
compare the unionists (about one-quarter of the sample) with other groups of
activists in the ESF (contrasting them in particular with the subgroup that has
been considered to be the most distant from the unionists: the ecologists) in
order to locate some of the changes in the labour movement against the
broader background of the global justice movement.
LABOUR AGAINST NEO-CORPORATISM?

(NOT JUST) A FLORENTINE STORY
Our Florentine story (with broader application) illustrates three challenges to
traditional industrial action, referring to the forms of the protest, organization
of protest and the framing of the issue.
From Concertation to Protest?
First of all, the forms of action disrupt institutionalized industrial relations.
The Florentine workers, and the Milanese before them, had refused to comply
with the regulations governing strikes in the public sector that had been written by union consultants in 1990 (Rusciano and Santoro Passarelli 1991). The
strike was defined by a trade unionist as
not a strike against the citizens . . . but a strike against this law that marginalizes us,
that makes us insignificant . . . there were nine strikes, and nobody talked about
them because we did not bother anybody . . . the wildcat strike was important in
order to raise the issue. (Interview 1)
Wildcat strikes are perceived as a way of regaining control of the workers

disruptive power against an aggressive opponent: Before arriving at the wild
strikes we were engaged in many regular ones, but they came to nothing if
we are not wild, we achieve nothing . . . but really, who is wild? The law 146
. . . is an offence against the workers (Interview 4).
Besides the search for disruptive forms of action, however, there is also the
perceived need for external support. If neo-corporatism and concertation had
77
meant depoliticization, the ATAF activists now involved the users of public
transport, by distributing
many leaflets, explaining that our bad working conditions meant a bad service for
them: because if I do not have the time to go to the loo, this happens because the
firm did not hire or the city council did not develop a system of lanes reserved for
the public transport . . . and this is why, even yesterday, I heard citizens saying: it is
not your fault, it is the fault of ATAF and of the local government . . . I was so glad
of all this solidarity, I had not expected it. (Interview 1)
The linking of the workers and users protest is also visible in the users
ticket strike organized by a public transport users network which the local
media described as a huge success, especially in terms of public support (La
Repubblica, 22 and 23 December 2003). As one activist recalls:
I received a call from a comrade of my collective . . . he had talked with his wife
about what was happening in Milan and decided that they had to do something, they
phoned people they know, found three or four, wrote a leaflet thanks to the workers in the transport system for their strike in defence of their dignity . . . they bought
some flowers and went leafleting at the bus stops to users and drivers, who took
them and posted them on the bus . . . after a few days somebody announced that
there was a city-wide assembly . . . ideas travel free, are not private property . . . so
we went to this meeting, found people from CPA [squatted youth centre], Beati
Costruttori di Pace [peace organization], others from the Social Forum, some from
Rifondazione Comunista and we as the libertarian [anarchist] collective . . . in a
couple of meetings we had the text of the leaflet . . . we decided on the ticket strike.
(Interview 3)
The return to protest, and to forms of protest outside the factories, is not rare.
In the second half of the nineties, protest extended to public services and was
aimed at privatization and its effects on domestic working conditions and the
global efficiency of services. The strikes in the Royal Mail and London
Underground in the UK, and in the public sector in Spain, France and Germany
were part of a larger trend. Apart from public transport, opposition to privatization extended particularly to schools and health. Often, these protests
involved various forms of participation by outsiders. As Piven and Cloward
(2000) noticed, if there is a decline in traditional strike activities, there is a
return to old forms of secondary actions, such as community boycotts, sympathy strikes and general strikes. As a trade unionist recalled, if in the protest
against the WTO in Seattle a few unionists took part in the blockade of the delegates, after that experience a lot want[ed] training in direct action (McNally
2001, p. 81). In Italy (as well as in France and Spain), the turn of the millennium was also characterized by general strikes against pension reform, privatization of public services, and cuts in public health and education. In these
actions, various organized networks joined the trade unions, linking labour
78
issues with global justice, defence of the environment, peace and gender equality. As one of our interviewees put it, there was awareness of the fact that in
order to build an alternative to the consociational union, you had to go beyond
the work place (Interview 7). The form of protest seems no longer to make a
clear distinction between old and new movements: for unionists there is the
discovery that other methods, other forms of mobilization not related to the
workplace and the strike, also make sense (Interview 7).
Rank-and-File Unionism?
Also in the organizational structure of the unions there are counter-trends to
the apparent institutionalization towards, if not one, at least a few well-structured interest organizations. As mentioned, the ATAF wildcat strikes were
decided by the drivers in general assemblies, opposed by the main unions, but
supported by the recently formed COBAS. They are part of a larger trend: in
the last two decades, various rank-and-file unions have developed, as splits
from the more established ones.
In Florence, as elsewhere in Europe, the institutionalization of the unions
has increased their power but changed their nature. The decline in the mainstream union membership seems, at least in part, to be an effect of the (dissatisfaction with the) development of interest politics as opposed to movement
politics, of the prevalence of a logic of influence over a logic of membership. Initially developing from a wave of protest in the educational system in
the late eighties, the membership of COBAS grew, especially in the late 1990s,
in the health system and the public sector in general (Interview 6). Other critical unions among them SinCobas (sindacato intercategoriale dei comitati di
base), which imported the slogan solidarity, unity, democracy from the
French union SUD (Interview 7) developed in the mid-nineties in the private
sector, including some large factories (such as Alfa Romeo and Fiat).
In their discourse, the activists of the critical unions presented themselves
as part of a larger movement. One of the accusations made by COBAS
activists against the mainstream unionists is that they increasingly prefer
selective incentives for their members to their mobilization in protest forms
according to one COBAS unionist:
I was in the CISL, not out of political belief, but because it was at the CISL that I
had attended a course to prepare myself for the concorso at the ATAF . . . the unions
try to recruit members during the medical when you join ATAF: here unionists
contact the new recruits and promise them help with finding housing, and so on
(Interview 1)
Traditional unionists are also perceived as compromising the workers

interests in particular, through urging the acceptance of the flexibilization of
79
contracts in exchange for individual privileges, such as time off work for
union representatives. But, above all, the activists of the new unions criticize
the bureaucratization of the old ones: they did not call public assemblies,
because they did not want to explain whats happening, it is not in their interest . . . there is no democracy in CGIL, CISL, UIL (Interview 4). Instead, new
unions stress a form of rank-and-file activism evident for instance in this tale
of the founding of COBAS ATAF:
We were just a few people, very enraged . . . we met and said, Lets see if we can
do something . . . now Im with people that think like me, we were a bunch of kids,
now we are 170 . . . we are organized in working groups, with a distribution of
specific tasks, but each chooses what he likes to do: the journal, the leaflet, internal
communication . . . we formed a COBAS branch because somebody came and
explained to us how it worked, and we said fine, lets set up a COBAS branch and
join COBAS federation . . . here I can express my opinions, develop ideas . . . without my wings being clipped. Other people were in other unions before, and there
you have to shut up, you can do nothing, you could not voice an idea different from
those of the big bosses . . . what I like here is, we do not have bosses. (Interview 1)
The emphasis on self-realization in a non-hierarchical structure is also

widespread in the public transport users network. In the account of another
member, the campaign for public transport developed within an organizational
structure that allowed for individual initiatives:
We circulated the leaflet by e-mail, in the mailing list of the social forum . . . it probably circulated widely . . . as you know, the members of the social forum mailing
lists have other mailing lists they can forward things to . . . there is a spiders web
. . . I do not know how these messages circulate, but I know that, before the press
talked about our initiative, I had already been contacted by e-mail by people from
Perugia, Turin . . . they all wanted to do something. (Interview 2)
The story of COBAS ATAF is similar to those of many critical unions that
developed in other European countries. In the various wave of strikes in
public services in the second half of the 1990s that occurred in countries with
pluralist patterns of industrial relations (with various representative organizations competing with each other), new unions highly critical of the various
forms of privatization arose and expanded from Coordonner, Ressembler,
Construire (CRC) and Solidaire, Unitaire, Dmocratique (SUD-PTT) in
France (Broud, Mouriaux and Vakaloulis 1998, p. 49) to the criticos fraction
of the Commissiones Obreras in Spain (Moody 1997). All these critical
unions share a critique of the bureaucratization of the official unions, and an
emphasis upon participation, which is reflected in the rejection of permanent
delegation and in the call for deliberation based upon consensus (or, at least,
qualified majority). They tend to develop in specific sectors often, but not
only, in the public administration and to network with similar groups. In
80
neo-corporatist countries, with occupational representation confined to a

single organization, similar challenges develop especially inside the publicsector unions (for instance, first the OETV and then ver.di in Germany).
From Interest to Identity?
It is no coincidence that the critical unions were heavily involved in the protest
campaigns against neo-liberal globalization. In our Florentine story, both
COBAS activists and the activists of the public transport users network had
participated in the first European Social Forum. Coherent with that experience
was the choice of a network structure, as well as the construction of a frame
that links the destiny of public transport in Florence, their workers and their
users to the struggle against neo-liberal globalization and in favour of global
social justice. It is not by chance that the founders of COBAS ATAF young
people, hired under so-called atypical and weakly protected contratti
formazione lavoro (special contracts for formation to work) today criticize
the centreleft local government for exploiting the workers and privatizing
public transport. They often project a self-image as public officers, who
have to offer a public service (Interview 1). In this sense, they link their
struggle with that of the community, deprived of public welfare by the waves
of privatization. The contratti interinali (temporary jobs) are denounced as
pure exploitation, and contracting-out as the end of public service in favour of
the market: the left and the right are the same: externalization and privatization are the same in both cases (Interview 4). In the words of one of the
founders of COBAS ATAF:
I wrote a leaflet and signed it . . . I wrote that the contratto formazione lavoro is a
fraud . . . in Palermo you call it kickback, we pay in order to be hired in a public job
. . . at one time, to join the ATAF, you had to pay the bureaucrat, there was clientelistic recruitment . . . the confederated unions had created a powerful sottobosco
[underworld] . . . I attacked the unions in this leaflet . . . a colleague, active in the
union, warned me: Are you crazy, they are going to sack you. (Interview 4)
Accused of defending old privileges, the public-sector unions often sought

consensus in public opinion by claiming to defend public against private
values, services against goods. In their leaflet entitled Wake up, Florence (no
date), COBAS ATAF declared that they were struggling for the future of local
public transport in Florence, against a privatization that would cut fundamental services. In this sense, they framed their action not as a corporatist
defence of privileges but as a progressive struggle for citizens rights: not just
a question of the public transport workers, but of all citizens, all workers, our
civilization. Class struggle is opposed here to the concertative regime, as a
collaboration that penalizes the workers (Interview 7) and, indeed, the
81
Italian critical unions developed mainly after the 1993 agreement that were
presented by their proponents as paving the way for concertative pacts.
Parallel to this, the network stressed that public transport is a public property, is a social property. As one of the network organizers recalls, the
demands of the workers on strike were perceived as issues of justice:
I wrote a leaflet on behalf of the Social Forum and, together with a small group of
people, we gave them out at the bus stops and we noticed how the climate had
changed towards solidarity with the workers, notwithstanding the inconvenience
linked to the strike . . . the constant reaction was we understand them very well, we
too cannot survive until the end of the month. (Interview 2)
Noting that, with the exception of the left-wing Rifondazione comunista,

the parties are absent and the politicians are closed in their palaces, the
activists stigmatize the widening gulf between representative politics and the
real world (Interview 2).
The development of a frame of global injustice has been perceived as
another recent tendency in the labour movement. The NAFTA Free Trade
Agreement of 1994 provoked an increasing number of transnational
campaigns among Canadian, US and Mexican workers (Gabriel and
Macdonald 1994; Ayres 1998; Evans 2000). The dockers of Seattle, who had
already taken part in a transnational strike initiated by the dockers in Liverpool
(Moody 1997), also supported the protest against the WTO, extending their
solidarity from the local to the international level (Levi and Olson 2000). In
these waves of mobilization, the labour movement met other movements
environmentalist, feminist, urban, and so on (della Porta et al. forthcoming).
The Labour Movement in the Global Justice Movement
The mobilizations around global justice are the context in which the changes
referred to took place. If we look at both individual and organizational characteristics, we can single out a consistent participation of unions and unionists
(or at least unionized members) in the mobilization over global justice. The
Genoa protest against the G8 in 2001 and the European Social Forum in
Florence a year later were part of the many, increasingly massive, transnational protest events that developed in the worlds North and South, especially
after the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, demanding global justice and
democratisation from below (Pianta and Silva 2003). Members of the critical unions such as SinCobas (Interview 7) had participated in the European
March against Unemployment in 1997 as well as in the international meetings
organized by the Zapatistas in 1996. While the critical unions (COBAS and
SUD among others) as well as the Italian metal-workers union FIOM were
members of the organizing committee of the Genoa Social Forum (that called
82
for the protest against the G8 in 2001), mainstream unions have since become
more and more involved in global justice organizations: Brazilian unions are
most active in the World Social Forum; the European Trade Union Committee
was among the organizers of the first European Social Forum in Florence in
2002; unions are present in several coordinating committees and networks
(such as the transnational organization demanding a Tobin tax on financiary
transactions, ATTAC). In fact, in many campaigns (including Jubilee 2000 or
the anti-NAFTA campaigns) unions have been allied with various movements.
NGOs and unions together protest against labour exploitation in less developed countries, often resorting to the (sometimes effective) strategy of boycott
(see Anner 2001, p. 35 regarding the successful campaign against Gap). This
global social unionism has been defined as a vehicle for broad social mobilization against injustice (Josselin 2002, p. 179).
Like its predecessor, the global justice movement is formed by networks
of networks, but the new definition as a movement of movements stresses
the preference for even more flexible organizational formats. Protest combines
the traditional repertoires built up during previous cycles of protest (especially
in the consolidation of non-violent forms of action) with certain innovations
(in particular, consumerist forms of protest and new tactics of civil disobedience). The definition of the conflict is a blend of Old Left attention to issues
of social justice with the new social movements focus on differential rights
(versus equality) with the stress upon multilevel, tolerant identities (della Porta
2005). We suggest that some of the observed changes in labour politics are
related to the interaction between the unionists and other activists in the global
justice movement.
A Movement of Movements: Networking Heterogeneous Actors
The first groundswell of protest over globalization, in Seattle, was greeted
with suspicion, as an unstable alliance of strange bedfellows: the unions, on
the one hand, and the new social movements of various sorts, on the other
protectionists and cosmopolitans, interest politics and identity politics, materialists and postmaterialists. Their alliance was predicted to be occasional and
episodic, not sedimented in unified organizations. We can recall, however, that
analyses of new social movements in general have stressed their network characters, differentiating them from the tendency of the labour movement to build
up strong organizations. As indicated above, criticism of bureaucratization has
also penetrated that section of the labour unions that has interacted more with
the mobilization on global issues.
The critique of hierarchical structures that emerges from the unionists
interviews certainly reflects the organizational model based upon a loose
structure of networks of networks that seems in turn to be adapted to deal
83
with the specific characteristics of contemporary movements. The global

justice movement is undeniably heterogeneous: not only socially but also from
a generational viewpoint. It also seeks to make diverse, distant national
cultures communicate. Although it has been described as a middle class
movement, surveys of demonstrators single out a large participation of workers in some protest events on global issues: as many as 11.1 per cent of the
Italian participants surveyed at the ESF define themselves as unemployed or
underemployed; 24.5 per cent as dependent workers and 7 per cent as
autonomous workers, while the remaining 57.3 per cent were students.
Although as many as 39.4 per cent of our sample were white collar workers,
13.1 per cent were blue collar workers. Also, the age components indicate a
large participation on the part of the adult population: 52.7 were below 25
years old, 25.7 between 25 and 35, 21.6 above 35 (della Porta 2004).
Moreover, as we can see from Table 3.1, not only are the unions important for
this movement (26.3 per cent of the participants interviewed were union
members), but their activists often take part in other movement organizations
as well. Furthermore, unionists are (or have been) members of youth centre
squats and student collectives, as well as of womens groups and pro-migrant
rights associations, albeit slightly less than activists of environmental organizations. And, even more than the ecologists, they belong to political parties
and citizens committees. Unionists generally tend to participate more in
voluntary associations, non-governmental organizations and religious groups,
too.
This rich social capital of activists points to continuities and innovations
vis--vis previous movements. The activists bring with them experiences of
participating in political and social groups. Multiple memberships at the micro
level, as well as cross-cutting issues and transnational networking in common
campaigns at the meso level, influence the organizational conceptions and
practices. In fact, as in other moments in history, the climax of protest has
caused the rise of new organizations, along with a sort of social appropriation of existing ones (McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly 2001) or, at least, their
transformation as a reaction to rank-and-file members. Involvement in this
network structure has enlarged the repertoire of organizational forms in the
labour sector, pushing new unions to adopt an anti-hierarchical format, emphasized in the rejection of delegates, replaced by rotating spokespersons, and in
consensual methods of decision-making involving qualified majority.
Cross-Contamination in Action Repertoires
As regards the movements forms of action, social and political heterogeneity
have led to contamination among different repertoires. The social movements
are in general characterized by the adoption of unusual forms of political
Table 3.1 Present and past participation of ESF activists (% yes)

Participation in
84
Social left
Student collective
Migrants association
Voluntary association
Womens group
Political movement/
network
Political party
Citizenscommittee
Sport and cultural
association
Religious community
Non-governmental
association
Only
environmental
organizations
Both
environmental
associations
and unions
Only
unions
Neither
unions nor
environmental
associations
Total
ESF
No. of
responses
37.1
62.7
32.7
60.6
25.0
48.6
34.8
65.8
59.6
64.8
44.0
78.4
30.0
58.7
38.8
43.0
24.0
72.4
28.3
49.9
21.8
42.4
9.7
37.2
32.0
57.4
33.4
51.0
21.5
52.5
2461
2478
2473
2476
2481
2477
22.9
21.8
59.8
64.2
37.9
56.2
65.4
30.2
45.9
18.6
11.9
44.7
34.5
21.6
50.9
2484
2474
2473
19.9
48.3
23.2
61.0
15.4
45.2
18.6
27.9
19.1
41.4
2475
2471
85
behaviour. Many scholars see the fundamental distinction between the movements and other political actors as lying in the formers use of protest as a way
of applying political pressure (Rucht 1994) that is, in an unconventional
form of action that breaks the daily routine. Through the mass media, the
protesters normally turn to public opinion rather than to elected representatives or the public administration. Through protest, the social movements seek
to influence public decision-makers using three different types of logic: i) a
capacity to cause material losses, or what may be termed the logic of damage;
ii) the spread of their convictions, on a logic of numbers; or iii) the urgency
for action by citizens, or the logic of witnessing (della Porta and Diani 1999,
ch. 7).
The main instrument of industrial conflict the strike is the typical illustration of the functioning of the logic of damage, since breaks in production
reduce profits. The institutionalization of labour conflict has brought about a
reduction not only in the number of strikes, but also in their magnitude, which
has reduced the damage they cause. In neo-corporatist settings and around the
concertation table, potential damage is threatened as a potential negative
incentive, but not actually implemented. Through political exchanges,
however, the workers are also able to use the threat to public order, and therefore to government legitimacy, in order to provoke state intervention in
contract negotiations. With few exceptions (for instance in occupations), the
logic of bearing witness has tended to disappear from the repertoire of industrial conflicts.
The return of more disruptive forms of protest (such as wildcat strikes and,
increasingly, road blocks) in labour conflicts can also be linked to the development of the global justice movement and labour involvement in it. The
global movement against neo-liberalism has indeed used a varied, and in part
innovative, repertoire of action, returning to the less institutionalized (and
more damaging) forms of direct action, while also paying attention to the
mass-media appeal of an action and of its intrinsic meanings. By naming and
shaming, boycotts or general strikes aim at reducing the profits of the
targeted corporations. The large marches witnessed during general strikes as
well as the participation of unions in the recent mass demonstrations against
the war in Iraq have reaffirmed a logic of numbers that around the concertation table was displayed via union membership cards, without being visible
on the street. The logic of witnessing in particular implies the use of techniques that enhance the symbolic impact of the actions so as to attract media
attention. In the protest against factory dismissals or privatization of public
services, the use of hunger strikes has sought to dramatize the appeal to
public opinion (della Porta 2005).
Again, new strategies seem to be learned both through the presence of
activists with a rich previous experience of various forms of political partici-
Table 3.2 Forms of political participation of ESF activists (% yes)
86
Convincing somebody to
vote for a party
Party activities
Petitions
Leafleting
Taking part in assemblies
Striking
Taking part in a sit-in
Boycotting
Occupying public
buildings
Squatting
Damaging property
Only
environmental
organizations
Both
environmental
associations
and unions
Only
unions
Neither
Total
unions nor
ESF
environmental
associations
No. of
responses
46.6
64.8
70.5
42.4
51.7
2447
24.4
92.7
72.3
92.4
83.0
71.2
71.8
67.5
55.3
96.5
87.8
92.7
90.3
80.4
78.3
69.7
59.6
94.0
85.8
93.0
92.8
75.8
68.4
66.2
20.6
81.4
63.7
89.0
83.1
57.5
56.5
68.2
33.4
89.0
73.5
91.2
85.8
68.0
66.1
67.9
2449
2464
2452
2464
2460
2434
2450
2463
28.4
5.3
26.4
9.8
24.5
15.5
24.2
7.2
25.8
8.5
2446
2447
87
pation and through involvement in common campaigns. The survey of participants at the ESF in Florence in 2002 indicates that unionists who took part in
this initiative had indeed experience of a vast range of repertoires of protest
(see Table 3.2). Although they have slightly less experience of direct action
(such as squatting) and more with traditional forms of participation (such as
party activities), unionists resemble their fellow participants in having a rich
repertoire of protest.
Global Justice and Other Identities
Social heterogeneity and network organization are interwoven with particular
forms of collective identity. In the past, the movements that referred to homogeneous social groups in particular, specific social classes or ethnic groups
often developed strong, all encompassing, exclusive identities, especially in
the initial stages of their mobilization. The need to build up an us, often by
inverting the sign of a stigmatized identity to form a positive one (for instance,
in the case of workers, African-Americans or women), led to a clear antagonism to the outside, the other. The search for an emergent collective identity
often took the path of developing utopias. In the case of the movement for
globalization from below, the multiplicity of reference bases in terms of class,
gender, generation, race and religion seems instead to have impelled it in a
direction of not weak, but certainly composite identities (della Porta 2004).
Concerns with the environment, womens rights, peace and social inequalities
remain as characteristics of subgroups or networks in the mobilization on
globalization. The definition of movement of movements stresses the
survival of the specific concerns and the non-subordination of one conflict to
another.
Through frame-bridging, the fragments of diverse cultures secular and
religious, radical and reformist, younger and older generations have been
linked together into a broader discourse that has taken the theme of social (and
global) injustice as a master frame, while still leaving broad margins for separate developments. The metaframe of global justice facilitates the participation
of unions and union activists, resonating with the traditional egalitarian
appeals of the labour unions, but linked with a transnational dimension as well
as the acceptance of a plurality of conflicts. In fact, privatization of public
services and cuts in the welfare state are linked to neo-liberal globalization,
as characterizing not only the policies of the international financial organizations (World Bank, IMF and WTO), but also the policy choices of national
right-wing and even left-wing governments. These are considered to be
responsible for growing social injustice and its negative effects on women, the
environment, the South, and so on. In the European Union, under the pressure
of the Maastricht convergence criteria, austerity policies were implemented,
Table 3.3 Trust of ESF activists in various institutions (% who have much or some trust)
88
Movement
Political parties
United Nations
European Union
National parliament
National government
Local government
Church
Media
Judiciary
Police
Only
environmental
organizations
Both
environmental
associations
and unions
Only
unions
Neither
unions nor
environmental
associations
Total
ESF
90.9
16.3
33.2
29.8
14.2
6.0
53.3
19.1
13.4
40.1
6.8
92.6
26.5
27.6
22.6
17.7
4.9
46.9
16.6
10.0
35.6
7.1
90.3
29.4
22.5
20.4
16.9
6.9
38.3
12.8
8.3
30.1
5.1
86.4
17.2
31.2
29.1
13.2
6.5
44.3
18.1
14.0
37.9
8.5
89.3
20.4
29.7
26.8
14.8
6.2
46.2
17.2
12.2
36.8
7.3
No. of
responses
2408
2366
2386
2386
2370
2393
2311
2386
2395
2371
2396
89
either within or outside the framework of concertation pacts, but often with the
support of mainstream trade unions. As could be seen in the ATAF strike, faced
with economic difficulties and high unemployment rates, workers started to
criticize these agreements.
Disappointment with representative politics is reflected in mistrust of institutions; confidence is placed instead in movement politics. While in the late
1960s the 68 movement had already criticized the bureaucratization of representative institutions and their isolation from citizens, the political parties,
especially on the left, were subsequently regarded as the main potential allies
of the movement, managing to channel the protest. Protest not only developed
outside the parties but also expressed strong criticism of the forms of representative democracy. The unionists we interviewed in Florence share with the
other demonstrators a low level of trust in representative democracy (even in
unions themselves) and instead a strong faith in social movements as main
actors of democracy (see Table 3.3).
LABOUR MOVEMENTS AND MOVEMENT STUDIES:

SOME (IN)CONCLUSIVE REMARKS
We have singled out certain developments in union politics: the re-emergence
of direct forms of action, outside the workplace, too; the emergence of critical unions; the framing of labour issues in terms of global justice. At least
during waves of protest, it seems that the borders that are usually set between
(regulated) interest politics and (disruptive) social movements have been
blurred.
We have to be careful in interpreting these changes. Some of the new
repertoires of labour protest succeed in disrupting the routine, and even occasionally reach their goals, but they do not compensate for the quiescence
observed in many places of work. Precarious workers, and even the unemployed, start to protest, but they are obviously still weak on the labour market.
Some strikes win support, but some do not. Rank-and-file unions have won
members from the more traditional and bureaucratic unions, but they are
nowhere in a majority. Moreover, the trend towards a decline in union
membership is still recognizable in many European countries (Norris 2002,
p. 175).
It remains to be seen to what extent the emphasis on participation helps
address the phases of negotiation that follow mobilization. To go back to our
Italian illustration, the weak representative capacity of the rank-and-file
unions is indeed noticed by their competitor in the more traditional transport
union FILT-CGIL:
90

COBAS might be represented in the periods of strong social tension and rage, but
then COBAS do not have any representation in the negotiations, because the workers, even those who strike with them sometimes, they do not give them this type of
trust. COBAS allow the tension to be released in situations of strong discontent, but
then, when the discontent is over, you realize that you have to reason, you cannot
solve problems with principled positions. (Interview 5)
If this vision might be too pessimistic, the same members of the critical
unions point out their difficulty in being recognized as partners in contract
negotiations difficulties that the more traditional unions are accused of
increasing through concertation with the employers and of exploiting in their
competition for membership (Interviews 6 and 7). Moreover, they stress that
our conception of self organization . . . is strong and functions during the
struggles, it is more difficult to support when the movement declines
(Interview 6). Rooted in specific factories and public sectors, critical unions
are also quite fragmented: in the ten years after the foundation of COBAS in
1986, as many as eleven different critical unions have been counted (Interview
6).
At the organizational level, unions have learned from participating in
common campaigns. During, for instance, the anti-NAFTA mobilization, the
American unions sought to gain efficiency by bringing the consumer into
action (through boycotts and critical consuming) and the saver (through ethical banks). Italian unionists in the South declared they had learned the efficacy
of road and rail blockades from protests against hazardous waste. These various repertoires are, to be sure, increasingly combined with official labour
strikes. Once again, the broadening of repertoires of collective action is a characteristic of cycles of protest during which forms of protest are invented,
bridging different actors traditions. It is an open question to what extent
strategies that require the active support of citizens in solidarity with the workers can survive low ebbs of mobilization.
References to global justice and participatory democracy are, as mentioned
in the Florentine case, widespread even in local unions that frame their
specific demands in terms of the defence of the welfare state. The reference to
a master frame is a way for them, as it is for other organizations active in the
movement, to bridge single issues with a common mobilizing theme. For
unions, however, this means the need to convince members to adhere to a
larger discourse that goes well beyond the defence of their direct, material
concerns with a tension critical unions are well aware of: we succeeded in
mobilizing our members on the issue of the war in Iraq, but the issue of globalization, with all that is linked to it, is more difficult to explain . . . and in
period of stronger political commitment, we are less present in the workplace
(Interview 6). Especially when mobilization declines, the precarious equilibrium between global issues and specific solutions could be disturbed in favour
91
of particularistic struggles that might be more suited to the recruitment of

members.
Many of the changes in unionism I have sketched could, moreover, be interpreted as adaptation to weaknesses, and not signs of strength. Nevertheless,
they allow for an approach to labour politics (or, at least part of it) from the
categories and hypotheses of social movement studies, rather than interest
politics, while they also challenge them. Early research on new social movements (Touraine 1978) and post-materialist values (Inglehart 1977) announced
the overcoming of conflicts over economic equality and the emergence,
instead, of new demands tied more to the defence of individual freedoms in
the face of the new technological society. The new middle classes were
regarded as the main reference base for the new movements, which were
however not attributed to a class basis, but rather to a sharing of new values
or other codes (Melucci 1996). There was some convergence in the
approaches to social movements and labour conflicts at least in considering
the two fields as worlds apart.
The end of the mid-century compromise between capitalism and the
welfare state (Crouch 1999) brought into view the conflicts on social rights
underlined in the definition movement for the globalization of rights albeit
not without focusing attention on new themes (like environmental sustainability or gender equality) that had emerged with the new social movements. The
theme of social justice typical of the Old Left encountered the defence of
cultural differences, gender parity or the natural environment more typical of
the newer movements. Consequently, class conflict as proclaimed since the
sixties, at least for Western societies does not appear to be pacified: instead,
wealth distribution is again becoming central to the political debate. In this
sense, the movement on globalization presents the challenge to reopen the
academic debate on the structural nature of the conflicts in a society that can
no longer be simply defined as post-industrial.
As for labour studies, leaving aside the (open) question of how widespread
and sustained labour protests are, they also seem to indicate certain internal
challenges to the stability of neo-corporatist or concertational pacts (challenges that, parenthetically, Philippe Schmitter already discussed in 1981).
First of all, can interest representation survive, and thrive, without the
construction and strengthening of collective identities and shared solidarities?
Neo-corporatist agreements are based upon a strong delegation of power
from the reference base to the top of the labour organization: with the strength
of number provided them by their membership cards, representatives of the
union sit around trilateral concertation tables and reach agreements.
However, as Alessandro Pizzorno (1977) indicated many years ago, there is a
potential tension between the interests of the leaders (pushing for increasing
their power of delegation) and those of their reference base (pushing for an
92
improvement in their own conditions). Additionally, the institutionalization

of industrial relations reinforces interest politics, reducing the feelings of
solidarity and collective identity that are often produced in action, in the
struggle.
This question is also linked to action strategies: to what extent can the
unions strength be sustained around the concertation table? Both social
movement research and research on the labour movement have stressed that
identities are formed in action: occupations, wildcat strikes and other disruptive forms of action have created strong solidarities (Fantasia 1988). Action
repertoires have not merely external, instrumental aims; large demonstrations
also empower participants, reinforcing the feeling of belonging to a wider
community of equals. Interestingly enough, the ritual of marches has
changed: from being oriented to showing unity and organization to a more
theatrical display, giving space to a colourful expression of diversity and
subjectivity (see, for instance, Rucht 2003 for an analysis of the Labour Day
marches in Germany). In fact, James Jasper (1997, p. 237), stressing the
euphoria and pleasure involved in protest, observes that tactics represent
important routines, emotionally and morally salient in these peoples lives.
The (new) addition of protest to the repertoire of the labour movement could
be expected to result in the strengthening of collective identities; conversely,
concertation, by relying upon the action of representatives, reduces internal
solidarities.
There is a third problem. Neo-corporatist agreements and concertation
pacts have usually worked in the past when left-wing national governments
guaranteed the long-term respect of the agreements, and when labour did not
escalate its demands in a strong labour market. Moreover, the state accepted
responsibility for covering some of the costs and distributing benefits. Under
the pressure of economic globalization and neo-liberalist thinking, at least on
the European continent, these types of agreement seem to have been broken
by right-wing and left-wing governments alike. The wildcat strikes of the
ATAF drivers as well as the mass participations of unionists in the global
justice movement seem to express this sense of betrayal, where consociational
pacts are perceived as lemons by the workers.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Part of this paper was translated by Iain L. Fraser. Simone Baglioni helped to
conduct the interviews on the ATAF strike, Lorenzo Mosca conducted the
other interviews quoted below, the ESF survey was coordinated by
Massimiliano Andretta and Lorenzo Mosca, and Maria Fabbri input the data.
93
NOTES
1.
2.
3.
The number of days per 1000 workers lost through strikes between 1965 and 1974 was a great
deal higher in countries with a pluralist system (1660 in Italy, 1330 in the USA, 740 in Great
Britain and 810 in Finland) than it was in countries with a neo-corporatist one (270 in the
German Federal Republic, 70 in the Netherlands, 40 in Switzerland and 20 in Austria)
(Wallace and Jenkins 1995: 106).
According to Frank L. Wilson (1990), however, the level of neo-corporatism has no influence
on indicators of mobilization such as public attitudes towards a social movement, inclination
to support a cause or willingness to use non-conventional protest tactics.
The representativeness of the sampled interviewees was monitored in relation to the known
dimensions of the universe. In particular, we compared the distribution of our sample according to nationality with that of those enrolled at the ESF. Our sample was well balanced and
also maintained an equilibrium between male and female.
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LIST OF INTERVIEWS ON ATAF STRIKE:

Interview 1 with a founder of COBAS ATAF, Florence, 29 January 2004.
Interview 2 with a founder of COBAS ATAF, Florence, 23 January 2004.
Interview 3 with a founder of Rete di solidariet agli autoferrotranvieri, Florence, 23
January 2004.
Interview 4 with a founder of Rete di cittadini a sostegno degli autoferrotranvieri,
Florence, 20 January 2004.
Interview 5 with representative of FILT-CGIL Toscana, Florence, 20 January 2004.
OTHER INTERVIEWS:
Interview 6 with representative of the COBAS-scuola, Milan, October 2004
Interview 7 with representative of SinCobas, Milan, October 2004.
PART II
Democratic transitions and consolidation
4. From democracy to democratization:

before and after Transitions from
Authoritarian Rule
Terry Karl1
Think back to the time when Philippe Schmitter, Guillermo ODonnell and
their colleagues first conceptualized the four-volume path-breaking study
Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy in Latin
America and Southern Europe (ODonnell, Schmitter and Whitehead 1986).
Today, when almost all regions of the world except the Middle East have been
swept by democratization and virtually every government (no matter how
authoritarian) claims to be a democracy, it is difficult to remember how different the political and conceptual map looked a quarter century ago. At that time,
the Transitions project simply could not have been launched in most of the
countries under discussion; their rulers would have considered both its subject
and its spirit to be subversive. Much of Latin America was authoritarian; some
long-standing democracies like Chile had not long before experienced a brutal
and dramatic reverse wave back to autocracy; and the countries of Southern
Europe had not yet demonstrated that they could shake off the powerful legacies of their personalistic or military regimes. So distant did the achievement
of democracy seem that, at the 1979 opening session to launch what was then
an unheard of cross-regional comparative study of how authoritarian regimes
might break down, one of the participants wondered aloud whether this was
merely an exercise in wishful thinking.
Transitions from Authoritarian Rule inspired a growth industry of democratization studies. More importantly, grounded as it was in strong normative
goals as well as realistic assumptions, the project profoundly influenced the
thinking of democratizers working to bring about the end of autocracies. Not
only did the final volume, the so-called the little green book by ODonnell
and Schmitter (1986), provide a blueprint for identifying the types of problems
these practitioners were likely to face in moments of transition, but it inspired
real hope among actors fighting in the trenches from Chile to South Africa to
Czechoslovakia that reaching democracy was indeed possible even in the
most unlikely of places as long as they acted with strategic vision and had a
99
100
little help from fortuna. Aiming at practitioners was a deliberate choice. After
living, suffering and studying authoritarian rule, the participants in the project
understood that difficult compromises would need to be made and especially
broad coalitions built if democratization were to be achieved. Rooted in an
intellectual spirit committed to change, the project self-consciously sought to
develop theoretical tools that could provide social agents with assistance in
altering terrible conditions of oppression. This interaction between praxis and
theory paid off. In the end, the Transitions project proved not to be wishful
thinking after all but rather, in Lowenthals (2004) words, thoughtful wishing about the creation of better polities that assisted democratizers in different parts of the globe.
From its beginning, this body of new democratization studies posed a challenge to the discipline of political science, especially to the growing trend to
import formal modelling and rational choice theorizing from economics.
With its emphasis on complexity and content rather than simplicity and
elegance, its insistence on the importance of process as well as accident and
unintended consequences for understanding outcomes, its blurring of the
boundaries between international relations and comparative politics, its stress
on ideologies as well as rationalities, and its promotion of cross-regional
comparisons as well as area studies, it offered scholars and practitioners a
different way of conceptualizing and understanding what became the foremost political trend at the end of the twentieth century. As the transitology
paradigm has been developed and extended, scholars have sought to identify
similarities and differences across diverse cases and regions to explain not
just successful transitions to democracy but also failed transitions, transitions
that never occurred and even transitions that might occur in the future. What
sets this work apart from most (but not all) previous theorizing is its demonstration that very different points of departure and a combination of variables
can produce the same broad types of outcomes across different regions of the
world.
This chapter examines the contributions of scholars of transitions by
illuminating, first, key shifts in our theoretical understanding that occurred
beginning with the publication of Transitions from Authoritarian Rule.
Here it focuses on establishing different insights into the role of elections
and, hence, the classification of regimes, as well as structural versus more
voluntaristic interpretations of politics and, hence, the role of supposed
preconditions. Second, it explores changes in research design that affect
how we understand the role of states, nationalities and international factors
as well as evaluate the importance of world regions and select units of
analysis. Third, it looks at a central methodological challenge posed by the
devices politicians choose during different modes of transition, especially
the role of political pacts.
From democracy to democratization
101
SHIFTING THEORY: FROM STRUCTURE TO AGENCY

AND BACK
Influenced by the seminal work of Rustow (1970) in identifying the characteristics of what they called the interval between one political regime and
another, ODonnell and Schmitter (1986) made the notion of transitions a
central concern of comparative politics. Transitions, they argued, are a distinctive moment in the political life and trajectory of a country a period of
unknown duration and extraordinary uncertainty that is generally initiated
from dynamics within the autocratic regime. They are different from the liberalization of authoritarian rule, in which restrictions may be loosened and some
individual or group rights may be expanded at the whim of the regime. Such
policy changes tend to reflect divisions between hardliners and softliners
within the prevailing autocracy, and eventually they escape the control of
incumbents and lead to some type of uncertain regime change. It is precisely
this extraordinary state of uncertainty that is the chief feature of a transition
from authoritarian rule. Characterized by a high degree of unpredictability,
lack of adequate information, sheer confusion among activists, inability to
calculate interests accurately and, often, accidental solutions, actions during
transitions are underdetermined, choices are underspecified, and outcomes are
uncertain. Contrary to interpretations by practitioners of democratic promotion or academic specialists working on other regions who tried to apply these
theoretical insights, there was never any claim that regime transitions meant
democratic transitions one of the chief misreadings of this work.2 Instead,
however one might have hoped for democratic outcomes, transitions could
also end in autocratic regressions, soft authoritarianism (dictablanda), hard
democracy (democradura) or revolution.
While it may be difficult to determine exactly when a transition begins, the
holding of elections and, more importantly, the general acceptance of the
preferences revealed by their outcomes most often mark its end. But, at least
in the original formulation, these founding elections occur in a very particular context characterized by overlapping processes of (i) the liberalization of
authoritarian rule, (ii) the formation or resurrection of civil society, which
then pushes the boundaries of change faster and farther than they otherwise
would have gone, and, only in this context, (iii) the holding of fair elections
of uncertain outcome. This is an important distinction because elections held
without these prior processes may have important political effects, but in
themselves they cannot be said to indicate that a regime transition has
occurred. Equating democracy with the mere holding of elections or assuming that such elections will subsequently generate further and deeper democratic reforms down the line commits the fallacy of electoralism (Karl 2000;
Carothers 2002; Diamond 2002). It also favours an excessively minimalist
102
definition of democracy in which accountability, perhaps the broadest and

most widely applicable meaning of modern representative democracy
(Schmitter 2004), is relegated to a narrow electoral sphere rather than to the
multiple and varied exchanges of responsibilities and potential sanctions
between rulers and citizens that may actually exist. Many regimes that have
taken advantage of these minimal definitions are not in transition from one
type of regime to another but rather use selective mechanisms of democracy
to create institutionalized gray zones (Carothers 2002). Rather than being
halfway on the road to regime change, some liberalized authoritarian regimes
with limited multiparty and electoral politics and some delegative democracies can be remarkably stable because their institutions and procedures
provide a site for the negotiation of elite interests, permit long-term agenda
setting, and even facilitate the cooptation of potential reformers. Both Mexico
under the PRI and many Middle Eastern polities demonstrate this (Brownlee
2005). And, contrary to the expectations of the original model linking liberalization and transition, liberalization does not always lead to a change in regime
(for example, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria and Jordan); nor does it always escape
the control of incumbents. Instead, it may be a device for maintaining their
control, and so hybrid regimes may be consolidated and even sustainable for
quite some time.
Thus the study of regime transitions has clarified that elections matter both
more and less than theorists once thought. On the one hand, holding competitive, free and fair founding elections based on mass suffrage can be the key
threshold that marks a distinctive shift in the political rules of the game. They
may not end the transition; there can still be a regression to autocracy and elections certainly do not guarantee consolidation. But they certainly signal that
regime institutionalization has begun and raise the threshold for those who
desire to return to the status quo ex ante. If such elections occur in the context
of transition, they may be significant enough to alter a countrys entire political trajectory. On the other hand, more and more regimes have been adopting
and adapting the formal trappings of elections while limiting the application
of other democratic rules and processes. The most common explanation for
this search for respectability is that the holding of elections in autocratic
regimes is due almost exclusively to the Wests insistence upon an outward
show of democratic forms (no matter how superficial) in the wake of the Cold
War and the absence of competing hegemons to counter this pressure. The
hegemony of liberal democracy as a legitimate regime type has meant that the
trend toward democracy has been accompanied by an even more rapid countertrend towards hybrid regimes.
While this more nuanced view towards elections and regime classification
is significant, the chief theoretical legacy of Transitions from Authoritarian
Rule is the emphasis on human agency, as well as the notion that transitions
103
can take place in a wide variety of social and economic settings. What matters
most in such times of abnormal politics are not the structural conditions that
may subsequently shape a polity but rather the short-term strategic calculations of actors. When choices are intelligent, broad coalitions are built, hardliners are isolated and fortuna smiles, the combination of pressures from both
inside and outside the regime can eventually result in a change of regime
marked by the convocation of founding elections of generally uncertain
outcome. Where this occurs, a transition from authoritarian rule becomes a
transition towards democracy. Thus the study of democratization rests upon a
logic of analytically distinct but empirically overlapping causal sequences
which, under the best of circumstances, can (but will not necessarily) proceed
from the decay and disintegration of authoritarian rule to regime transition to
the emergence of a new democracy (ODonnell and Schmitter 1986).
This broad analysis, more than anything else, made the study of transitions
and especially transitions that lead to democracy a distinct area of scholarship.
Conceptually, it broke with the preconditions tradition that regards the establishment of democracy as the by-product of higher levels of modernization
characterized by greater wealth (Lipset 1959), the formation of a bourgeoisie
(Moore 1966), more tolerant civic cultures (Almond and Verba 1963) or overcoming economic dependency (Cardoso and Faletto 1979). In marked contrast
with the mainstream scholarship of the 1960s and 1970s, which focused on the
search for the necessary conditions and prerequisites correlated with the eventual attainment of stable democracy, this outcome was understood to be the
product of strategic interactions among political elites. They were often
pushed from below, and they made conscious choices under exceptional
conditions about the types of constitutions, electoral arrangements, party
systems, civilmilitary configurations and economic models their countries
should adopt. While not denying the long-term causal impact of structural
factors on democratization, their short-term manifestations were not determinative in this critical juncture.
The shift from necessary and sufficient conditions for understanding both
the origins and the outcomes of regime change has focused research away
from the causes to the causers of democratization (Huntington 1991, p. 106).
This has produced several general propositions which, while not very satisfying to those seeking a general theory of democratic transition, have been
repeatedly reaffirmed in empirical work. First, transitologists (and subsequent empirical realities) have verified the hopeful wishing of the past by
substantiating the claim that there are very few preconditions for the emergence of democracy; democracies can be built in both favourable and improbable settings. In this respect, this literature has demonstrated the fallacy of
longstanding conventional views that economic development causes countries
to become democratic (Lipset 1959; Jackman 1973) by showing that the level
104
of development is not always a good predictor of the origin of democratic transitions, even if it certainly helps to explain part of their subsequent survivability (Przeworski et al. 2000, ch. 2).
This finding rests on the crucial distinction between regime transition and
regime consolidation. The claim is frequently made that the positive relationship between democracy and economic development has repeatedly been
established beyond reasonable doubt (Geddes 1999, p. 117), but past statistical studies have not distinguished between already existing democratic
regimes and those in actual transition. When these distinctions are made, the
finding is different: preconditions matter a great deal for the survivability of
democracy but not for the transition to it (Przeworski et al. 2000). While the
level of development does influence the long-term durability of democracy,
even here it seems to be a sufficient, not a necessary, condition to survivability. Witness, for example, the respectable number of poor countries that have
remained democratic such as Albania, Bolivia, Mongolia and Mali albeit not
always stably so in defiance of the beyond reasonable doubt correlation.
Still, there are limits to intelligent and purposive human agency even in
moments of abnormal politics when long-term constraints are at least
temporarily eased. Despite the impression given by some that crafting democracy
is simply a matter of elite disposition or will (Di Palma 1990; Dogan and Higley
1998), and notwithstanding the fact that calculations have often been emphasized
to the exclusion of all other factors involved in creating and consolidating new
polyarchies, some structural conditions do seem to rule out the probability of a
successful transition to democracy, previously defined and agreed upon. Take, for
example, the Rustow condition of no nation state, no democracy or the Moore
condition of dominant traditional agrarian elite, no democracy. Furthermore,
the perceived range of choice implied by the emphasis on purposive political
action can be deceptive even in the midst of a transition: some transitions may be
subject to more constraints than others. This is even more the case in the posttransition period when actors have already chosen some set of institutions based
on these very constraints and are trying to make them work. Under these circumstances, what may appear to be an unusually wide space for political choice can
be severely circumscribed in practice by more proximate factors.
Countries dependent on the export of petroleum, and hence exhibiting an
oil effect that delays and sometimes deters democracy, provide a good example. High levels of dependence on oil rents tend to support generally autocratic
regimes in these countries for unusually long periods of time, thus depressing
the likelihood of regime transition. The performance of the oil market
profoundly influences the timing of regime change when it does come; and, in
the rare case where a democracy is actually established, reliance on oil as the
chief source of foreign exchange traps leaders into very perverse decisionmaking paths, leading to defective democracies. The explanation lies in an
105
extreme form of rentier state, which permits exceptionally extensive patronage

and militarization, which proves especially effective at holding contestation at
bay (Karl 1997). This finding, which has been confirmed by numerous statistical studies (Ross 2001; Teorell and Hadenius 2004), poses an alternative explanation for why the Middle East and North Africa (with the exception of two
non-oil countries, Turkey and Lebanon) have not been caught up in the global
wave of democratization. Rather than emphasizing the clash of civilizations
or the presumptive inhospitality of Islam to democracy, it notes that virtually all
rich oil exporters are electoral underachievers, while countries that either
have no oil or whose oil is no longer producing massive rents are electoral
overachievers. This may help to clarify why so many political liberalizations
that had begun in this region were stalled or reversed, why no authoritarian
executive has been removed from office through elections, and why elections
(when introduced at all) are held primarily in non-oil rather than oil-rich countries. In the context of exceptional cooptation and repression permitted by oil
rents, the emergence of a strategic opposition coalition, so essential to pushing
liberalization into democratization, is especially difficult to achieve.
A second central finding of transitology is that democratization is the
result of a combination of causes, not merely one single cause. Potential candidates range from the nature and extent of divisions within the prior non-democratic regime (ODonnell and Schmitter 1986; Kitschelt et al. 1999), the
quality of elite decision-making (Dogan and Higley 1998), the strength of civil
society measured by class actors (Collier 1999; Wood 2000) or social movements (Tarrow 1995), the distribution of ethnic groups (Offe 1997), the pressure from hegemons or other countries or the removal of such pressure
(Whitehead 1996; Drake 1998) or the location of countries in a pattern of
international diffusion (OLoughlin et al. 1998). What is also evident is that
the same cause may or may not have the same effect in different settings.
In this respect, democratization theories differ from many other theories in
political science because they emphasize multiple causation and often
conclude with equifinality, arguing that different variables or combinations of
variables can produce the same result, namely a transition to democracy. This
casts doubt on the prospects for building a single general theory of the origins
of democracy. With the constant introduction of new causal variables and the
multiplication of explanations, various scholars (Shin 1994; Diamond, Linz
and Lipset 1995; Mahoney and Snyder 1999; Munck 2004) have made heroic
efforts to synthesize these debates as well as the range of explanatory factors.
Rational choice approaches, often making the claim of building towards
generalizable game-theoretic models of democratic transition, have also tried
to cope with complex and often chance causation, but their explanatory variables also vary considerably between models that highlight the critical role of
triggers of the previous authoritarian regime (Geddes 1999) or the economic
106
interests of actors conceived in class terms (Boix 2000). Thus, despite some
impressive progress on the causes of democratization, there is still no integration of these diverse factors into a hierarchy of explanation that could be called
a general theory of transition.
The same cannot be said for democratic consolidation. Despite the debate
over the notion of consolidation as a framework for thinking about post-transitional settings and despite the fact that it has been used in such different ways
for such different ends that it has lost conceptual clarity, most scholars tend to
agree with Rustows (1970) proposition that what explains a transition to
democracy may be different from what explains its subsequent fate. While the
answers posed are still predictably varied and often controversial, one major
feature of consolidation clearly differentiates it from transition: the consolidation of democracy is defined by the substantial reduction in the uncertainty
that is so central to transition. Indeed, it is about institutionalizing some relative high degree of certainty through a common set of rules (both formal and
informal), generally understood political roles and relatively well-delineated
policy arenas. This means that consolidation is characterized by an internal
logic composed of interdependent conditions not the same degree of chance
or incidental events that elucidate transitions. It also means that this logic can
be identified, as Schmitter and Schneider (2004) have demonstrated by means
of scalograms. In effect, the factors involved in the consolidation of democracy show a strong sense of internal ordering across regions that simply cannot
be found among the characteristics of transition due to its more improvised
nature.
Finally, in consolidation the full range of structural explanations kick back
into the democratic equation and are much more predictive of performance.
This means, for example, that the level of development or the absence of
strong ethno-linguistic differences is strongly associated with successful
consolidation. Consolidation is simply far more standardized, imitative and
predictable than transition; thus it can more successfully draw upon democratic theory based on longer-term and less proximate structures, like the nature
or states or changes in the global economy.
SHIFTING DESIGN: FROM REGION TO

CROSS-REGIONAL COMPARISON AND BACK
The new democracy studies have also changed the design of research with a
significant impact on the generation of both theoretical and empirical findings.
Beginning with Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, scholars regularly began to
move beyond the original and valuable emphasis on area studies and embrace
systematic cross-regional comparison and cross-temporal comparisons in order
107
to discover what is similar and different about regime transitions in widely

variant contexts. The application of the transitions paradigm to Africa and the
post-communist East challenged the theoretical and geographic reach of
assumptions, concepts and conclusions based on the comparison between
cases in Southern Europe and South America. It also raised the question of
whether pre-existing scholarship might help in explaining these new regime
changes, regardless of their geographic location (Bova 1991; Schmitter and
Karl 1994; Bratton and van de Walle 1997).
But the suggestion to apply, test and modify the concepts and arguments from
the transition literature to these later democratic experiences was not without
controversy. Scholars initially argued that communist regimes had been unique
and without precedent, that transitions from totalitarianism would be much
more difficult than transitions from mere authoritarianism, that democracy
seemed highly unlikely given the legacy of communism and that the multiple
and simultaneous transformations confronting these countries placed them in a
different category (Jowitt 1992; Bunce 1995a, 1995b). Gradually this gave way
to the understanding that what was (and still is) occurring in Central and Eastern
Europe and the republics of the former Soviet Union is sufficiently analogous to
merit comparison with the earlier experiences in South America and Southern
Europe. Thus, instead of comparing post-communist regime changes only with
each other, these transitions have become irrevocably linked to broader questions of regime change in general and democratization in particular.
This incorporation has led to new theoretical insights, especially with
regard to the problem of prior stateness, the differential role of ethnic and
national cleavages, and the influence of international factors. In effect, even as
ODonnell (1999) was insisting on the importance of stateness and legality in
Latin America, the experiences of both Africa and some post-communist countries raised even more dramatically the problematic of democratizing backwards, that is, introducing competitive elections before establishing the basic
institutions of a modern state such as rule of law or the accountability of leaders (Bratton and van de Walle 1997; Rose and Shin 2001).
This means that points of departure in the modal paths of regime change are
often very different. That is, some transitions occur within the framework of
relatively highly bureaucratized states with institutionalized channels of interest representation (for example, Southern and Eastern Europe). Others are
almost totally neo-patrimonial and centrally characterized by both informal
and extralegal institutions (for example, sub-Sahara Africa). And still others
are some mix between the two (for example, much of Latin America). In this
context, the problem for new democracies is whether they can reverse the
sequence that characterized previous waves of democracy; that is, create or
enhance stateness and especially the rule of law after a transition and not
before (Bill Chavez 2003).
108
Central to this continuum of stateness is the monopoly over the use of coercion and the control of territory. Events in the communist bloc, which differed
from most of Southern Europe and Latin America where geographic borders
were not at issue during democratization, encouraged transition scholars to
correct their relative lack of attention to this, not only by introducing more
than 20 new states but also by raising serious and unresolved claims to a future
redrawing of state boundaries. Because in the post-communist cases (unlike
Latin America), there was a long tradition of civilian control over the military,
though coupled with the rise of armed civilian groups and party militias
contesting territorial boundaries, the greatest threats to democratization came
not from the military but from other sources. These included the rise of nationalisms, the fear of secessionist movements and the collapse of any monopoly
over coercive capacity. In this respect, both the post-communist countries and
Africa also highlight the importance of multiple nationalisms within the same
territory.
Perhaps most important, cross-regional comparisons have generated significant new findings that would not easily have been apparent through a regional
analysis alone. The fundamental hypothesis underlying the Eastern critics of
comparison, at least initially, was the notion that transitions from totalitarianism would be much more difficult than transitions from mere authoritarianism because of their Leninist legacies and their simultaneous transitions in the
economic and political sphere. But this has not proven to be the case. On the
contrary, not only have the range of their different types of regime change been
strikingly similar to the range of variations found in other regions, but also
Eastern European countries achieved the same or even higher levels of democratization as earlier cases from Southern Europe and Latin America. They did
so in a much shorter time and they show significantly greater popular support
at comparable periods in the transition and post-transition process (Karl and
Schmitter 2002; Schmitter and Schneider 2004).
What has proved especially difficult for democratization are, first, the socalled triple transitions, where the definition of the political community and
the drawing of territorial boundaries were added to the mix. But they are not
alone in their difficulties. Most Central American countries (with the exception of Costa Rica) also show lower levels of democratization, longer time
frames for moving to even a hybrid status, and less popular support for their
regimes. This suggests that backyard transitions, where the history of big
power intervention has been especially high (for example, much of Central
America and the Caribbean and the former Soviet republics), may be especially problematic, as numerous studies of democratic promotion demonstrate
(Lowenthal 1991).
Cross-regional comparisons also suggest hypotheses and propositions that
may help to explain these surprising findings. On the one hand, certain aspects
109
of the legacy of communism may prove positive for the consolidation of

democracy an explanation that the strong ideological basis of the former
Sovietology has helped to obscure. For example, for scholars honed on the
widespread poverty, extreme inequality and deficiency of educational opportunities resulting from the combined heritage of colonialism and authoritarian
rule in Latin America and Africa, the legacy of highly educated populations,
relative economic equality, relative lack of absolute deprivation and the
absence of long-enduring social classes that characterizes most (but not all)
post-communist countries is very striking. While this is changing rapidly and
sometimes dramatically in the post-communist countries, Tocquevilles earlier
argument that relative equality is a powerful enabling condition for building
enduring democracy is confirmed by recent formal models investigating the
developmentdemocracy connection (Boix 2003). This gives most postcommunist countries an enormous legacy advantage over most of Latin
America, where social classes are deeply entrenched, political institutions are
often captured and democracy has often been oligarchic.
On the other hand, the comparison with Latin America suggests that
double economic and political transition, that is, the simultaneous change
from autocracy to democracy and from socialist to market economies, may be
an advantage, not a disadvantage. As Fish (1998), Aslund (2002) and Bruszt
(in this volume) argue, contrary to the earliest arguments that successful
economic reform required restrictions on democracy to keep losers from
reversing progress (Przeworski 1991; Haggard and Kaufman 1995), the most
successful economic transformations in Eastern and Central Europe have
taken place in the most democratic contexts. In effect, where the balance of
power during the transition is equal and inclusive, this keeps early winners
from becoming too entrenched, encourages regulated markets and produces a
better equilibrium between citizenship rights and property rights. Where
economic transformation takes place primarily outside the framework of
democratic politics, either because it occurs under authoritarian rule or
because the removal of its distributional consequences are a condition
(implicit or explicit) of transition, the outcome is most often a corrupted
market and oligarchic democracy at best.
Thus, cross-regional comparisons suggest one major lesson: communism
may have been different from other types of autocratic rule; however, postcommunism may not be all that different from other post-autocratic experiences. Where violence and abuse have been especially high, post-communist
countries grapple (or fail to grapple) with ending the impunity of abusers and
dealing with the past just like countries in other regions. Where corruption
has been especially widespread, the rule of law becomes a particularly important issue just like in other regions. Where ethno-linguistic or religious
minorities have been especially oppressed and democracy allows them to
110
advance their historic claims, their loyalties and obligations provide much of
the substance of political controversy as in other regions. Where civil societies have been suppressed, weak or fragmented, they have to be strengthened
as in other regions. Where state formation and bureaucratization have
preceded democratization and are not changed by it, new democracies are
likely to be more stable just as in other regions. Where governments are
dependent on revenues from oil or natural gas, democratization becomes especially problematic. The similarities and the differences are compelling enough
to apply the same concepts, assumptions and hypotheses and to test them by
using the relevant experiences of every region of the world.
Finally, cross-regional studies have made the case for acquiring regional
expertise even more compelling. The shift to cross-regional comparison has
underlined the continuing need for analysis based on specific regions and even
clarified the analytical reasons for supporting area studies; comparison across
regions permits the identification of what is distinctive about any given region.
Take, for example, the relative importance of the international context and external pressures for creating a political ambience favourable to democratization:
while the significance of powerful international diffusion mechanisms has been
widely recognized (Whitehead 1986, 1996; Pridham 1991; OLoughlin et al.,
1998; Gleditsch 2002) and some of their active components have been identified, only a view through regional lenses has been able to demonstrate the fundamental importance of different regional dynamics in shaping the timing and
prospects for transitions to democracy or democratic breakdown.
Simply put, geographic location matters. The findings are convincing.
More than anything else, countries tend to become like their immediate
geographic neighbours over time, and political developments in one country
can have a strong impact on regime in other countries in the region (Gleditsch
2002). While this may seem self-evident, the notion of diffusion has not necessarily been based on a criterion of proximity. But the quality of the immediate
neighbourhood is crucial. In Eastern Europe, the attraction of joining the
European Union was so strong that even countries that had little in the way of
pluralist traditions emulated democratic modes of political conduct in hopes of
a genuine integration into the West. Indeed, one of the primary reasons Central
European countries represent success stories of transition is that they are
located closest to the core countries of Europe, while those countries
geographically farthest from the West and with little prospect of EU membership have not fared so well (Pridham 1991). In Latin America, a larger number
of democracies in the region in a given year enhanced the prospects that existing autocracies would undergo a transition; contrary to common wisdom, this
is a more important causal agent of democracy than economic performance or
international intervention (Brinks and Coppedge 2001).
Furthermore, a more democratic regional environment reduces the chance
111
of democratic breakdown in a particular country (Mainwaring and PrezLin 2004). This helps to account for importance differences in the timing of
democratic regime change across regions as well as some remarkable
geographic variations in regime type. Thus, while Eastern European and Latin
American countries have been proven to be a more fertile soil for democracy,
in part by contaminating their neighbours, Arab countries, the Caucasus,
Central Asia and sub-Saharan Africa tend to be authoritarian.
SHIFTING METHODS: REVISITING MODES AND PACTS

The new conceptualization of the origins of democracy put forward in the
study of transitions has also required a change in understanding the devices
used by politicians when they try to craft regime change. Because transitions
are understood to be based on short-term calculations that cannot be deduced
ex ante or even imputed ex post from the structural positions of influential
actors, the normal tools of social science have very real limitations in these
situations (ODonnell and Schmitter 1986). Such tools cannot explain whether
a transition will occur, how it will proceed or why it occurs when it does.
This is best seen by revisiting the problematic of modes of transition. While
authors have used diverse labels and means to identify the different paths
taken, modes of transition are usually distinguished by factors such as the
identity of the primary agent of change or the degree of control the outgoing
rulers exert over the process, on the one hand, and their different strategies
based on variations in the respective role of accommodation and conflict, on
the other. For example, in Karl (1990) and Karl and Schmitter (1991), this
specification of modes of transition and their hypothetical impact produce
four categories: (i) pacted, (ii) imposed (either externally or internally), (iii)
reformist, and (iv) revolutionary. This means that more than one equilibria
can be reached to bring about democracy. It can even mean, more definitively,
that the logic of transition cannot be reduced solely to a cooperative game in
which the balance between supporters and opponents is relatively equal a
description which does not apply to all modes.
Because orthodox quantitative studies have been unable to capture any
pattern of relationship between modes of transition and the durability of
democracy, scepticism has been expressed about the significance of different
modes for subsequent democratic consolidation. This scepticism has been
strengthened by the apparent experience of democracies born out of different
types of transition processes that do not seem to support what has been called
the birth defects or original sin hypothesis. The most devastating critique of
the significance of these various modes is that of equifinality. Contrary to all
initial expectations, many polities have successfully negotiated, struggled,
112
forced or manipulated their way to democracy, and they seem to have done so
irrespective of their differing modes of transition. Except for some cases of
imposition, when either outgoing rulers or occupying foreigners may exert
such strong control over the process that they can virtually write the new rules
of the game, it does not seem to make much difference whether the transition
was hammered out between incumbent softliners and moderate challengers or
thrust upon the ancien rgime by the mobilization of mass publics. Thus the
proposition that modes of transition matter for the subsequent process of
democratization has been cast in doubt. If they do not matter at all or if they
simply wash out when dealing with democratic durability, as Przeworski
(1991) claims, then it would make sense to abandon the search for the impact
of different modes of transition.
But this is not the case. Modes of transition are critical junctures in the long
process of institutional accumulation; they are key moments in which the fragments and parts of the new regime are constructed, with each fragment becoming an incentive for the addition of another (Sklar 1987, p. 714). The point is
that they do not take place in a vacuum but instead reflect uncertainty about
existing power relations and the possibilistic manner in which they may or
may not be subsequently reconfigured. They are highly contextualized and
interactive with other factors. In effect, they help to produce specific packages of the formal rules and informal arrangements that make up democracy,
or what Schmitter (1995) calls partial regimes. Thus what matters is not
simply the construction of a single political institution but rather how a
number of new political institutions (or older resurrected ones) relate to each
other. For this reason, the significance of different modes cannot be assessed
by examining particular elements alone. The fact that different modes of transition do not seem to have an independent discernible effect on the durability
of democracies, at least when measured quantitatively, misses this essential
point: one particular mode of transition will not correlate significantly with the
consolidation of democracy, especially when defined narrowly as the durability of democracy. Instead, different modes can lead to what appears to be the
same outcome, and the same mode in different contexts can produce different
outcomes.
Confusing the problem further is the fact that the same mode of transition
can produce very different outcomes, making it difficult to test whether any
one path is preferable. The theoretical basis for the superiority of pacted transitions rests on their central properties of constant negotiations between
authoritarian incumbents and the opposition as well as the presence of explicit
and interlocking agreements. This permits actors to foster mutual trust, respect
each others vital interests and build a new political community through their
construction of a commonly agreed upon set of institutions. Thus a pacted
transition in Spain produced a broad agenda of economic and political reforms
113
in the form of the 1977 Moncloa Accords and spawned an ambitious process
of bargaining that became the preferred mechanism for conflict resolution in
the so-called Spanish model (Linz and Stepan 1996). It also proved to be a
superior device for peacefully moving post-apartheid South Africa to democracy through explicit agreements over proportional representation, decentralization and the constitutional process (Sisk 1995). But pacted transitions, at
least in the context of high oil rents, have produced frozen institutional
arrangements that have entrenched social divisions, reduced competitiveness,
blocked innovation and ultimately subverted democracy as the case of
Venezuela poignantly demonstrates (Karl 1987). Testing the alleged superiority of pacted transitions can only be done when taking into account the larger
social context and the quality of choices that are made.
These methodological problems do not mean that the significance of modes
of transition cannot be determined or that the effort should be abandoned.
There is cumulative qualitative evidence to buttress the claim that the mode of
transition has an important impact on whether and how democracies consolidate although whether these paths lead to different identifiable and enduring
types of democracy and whether this has some enduring significance for the
quality of democracy remains to be seen. This does not mean that different
modes of transition necessarily leave permanent or irreversible legacies (birth
defects); nor does it signify that they are the only factor affecting the possibility and pace of democratic consolidation. But their impact can be seen
traced through distinguishable channels, most especially through the choice of
particular institutions (see, for example, Geddes 1996; Offe 1995; Elster, Offe
and Preuss 1998; Bastion and Luckham 2003). There is also evidence to
demonstrate that where mass publics are considerably more involved in the
transition the subsequent scope of contestation is greater (Collier in this
volume) and the patterns of market regulation and distribution may be fairer
(Bruszt in this volume). Furthermore, even under circumstances where the
transition is almost entirely an elite affair, different modes of transition can
affect the management of elite conflict and competition (Munck and Leff
1997).
Yet, as we have seen from the examples above, these outcomes are not easy
to tease out. Non-decisions or roads not taken may be as important as decisions
leading to democratic consolidation (for example, the blocking of parliamentarism in Brazil). The process that characterizes different modes may be as
important as the outcomes produced (for example, the intensive and continuous
bargaining that defines pacted transitions in Spain and South Africa). And rational intentional design, based on political and economic calculations may result
in unintended and even opposite consequences from those planned, as
Pinochets decision to hold a plebiscite in Chile demonstrates. For these reasons,
the application of orthodox quantitative methods to test the significance of the
114
mode of transition threatens to obscure a fundamental insight challenging

institutional approaches to politics, which is that actors make choices about
institutions and not just within them.
STARTING A DEMOCRACY, DEMOCRACY AS A START

Transitology has given hope to practitioners, pointing out that they may be
able to construct democracy in unfavourable settings and do not have to wait
until the structural or cultural conditions are right. Nonetheless, agents of
democracy need to be humble enough to recognize that many transitions are
accidental or unintentional, and even those that seem to be consciously
devised and imposed can end up becoming designer disasters. This is especially true when the large-scale external use of force is involved, which has so
often proved counterproductive. Because transitions are about rapidly shifting
and highly specific power relations and understandings, only the best, most
experienced and least ideological area experts can help make use of what are
very fleeting political opportunities. Should practitioners embark on intentional regime change, especially in unfavourable neighbourhoods, they will
usually have to negotiate with extremists of all sorts. Especially in violent
settings, democracies are not built by democrats alone and they are not always
built by democratic means. If democracy promoters do not heed these lessons
in cases where some type of transition from authoritarian rule has been initiated, then the failure to originate a new democracy is most often a problem of
strategic choice, not the absence of preconditions an observation with special
poignancy for Iraq.
Perhaps the most important contribution of transitology, in both theory
and praxis, has been to lighten the burden of pessimism over the possibility of
democratization that prevailed in more authoritarian periods when a long list
of necessary and sufficient prerequisites (almost never present and only
fulfilled by a small number of stable Anglo-American democracies) implied
that the demise of autocracies would simply produce other autocracies.
Transitions from Authoritarian Rule and the works that followed imbued
both academics and activists with Hirschmans (1971) bias for hope. Rather
than searching for probabilities, its authors adopted a possibilist approach,
understanding democratization as something that can be attempted, cultivated
and even flourish under the most unfavourable conditions with a little
fortuna and a bit of virt.
Whatever the ultimate impact of this latest wave of democratization there
is no question that the current mix of consolidated democracies, unconsolidated democracies and hybrid regimes (democraduras) has far exceeded the
initial expectations of the generation of scholars whose obsession was to get
115
rid of authoritarian rule. None of the countries we are studying have the
conditions that the literature tells us are requisite for democracy, Philippe
Schmitter remarked at the initiation of the Transitions project, and if we
accept the odds established by all previous attempts at democratization in
Latin America since 1900, two out of every three of our potential transitions
are soon doomed to fail. Sometimes it is nice to be wrong.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The author is very grateful to Colin Crouch and Wolfgang Streeck. Most especially, she thanks Philippe Schmitter for more than words can say.
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5. Democratization and the popular

interest regime in Latin America
Ruth Berins Collier
Two of Philippe Schmitters most important contributions to political science
are his conceptualization of democratic transitions and his work on associationalism, particularly the class-based structure of statesociety intermediation he labelled corporatism. In subsequent work, he bridges these two
contributions (Schmitter 1992), suggesting that the nature of the transition
affects the type of democracy that may be consolidated and providing a
framework for analysing democratic types based on partial regimes as
distinct sites of political representation. He further suggests that those partial
regimes that are constituted by associational activity are potentially becoming more important as the representational function of political parties
declines. This chapter uses this later work as a point of departure for
discussing democratization and interest intermediation in the post-transition
politics of Latin America, the empirical base from which Schmitter primarily
developed his original analysis.
Definitions of democracy have been hard to stabilize in the empirical study
of the global third wave of democratization at the end of the twentieth century.
Schmitter, with ODonnell (1986), was influential in orienting comparative
analysts of democratization towards a conception inspired by Schumpeter and
Dahl based on procedural minima. Although this conception met widespread
acceptance, many analysts, reacting on the basis of cases they knew well
which met the minimal criteria but did not seem democratic, imported additional traits into the definition to highlight the missing requirements, in order
to preserve, for instance, a distinction between electoralism and democracy. I
would argue that at the base of the definitional problem lies a question of
domain: is democracy a type of regime (a set of institutions, such as free and
fair elections and civil rights) or a form of sovereignty (specifically, popular
sovereignty or rule by the people)? The former is attractive for the field of
comparative politics in that it is more compatible with empirical analysis,
which can focus on well-specified institutions and structures. The latter is the
subject of centuries-old theorizing and presents the analyst with intractable
problems: as a first step in proceeding with an empirical analysis based on this
119
120
conception, one must answer the question Held (1987, pp. 24) posed: Who
are the people and what does it mean for them to rule?
Despite the difficulties, the conception centred on sovereignty continues to
exert a compelling pull, especially as analysis moves beyond the study of
democratic transition and as questions about the distribution of power and
structures of representation become central. ODonnell and Schmitter have
each moved beyond the procedural minima in ways that implicitly reintroduce
concerns of sovereignty. ODonnell has questioned the degree to which
democracy can be limited to regime institutions, problematizing whether it
must necessarily involve a democratic state that can protect social and especially civil rights in order to enable the exercise of citizenship (ODonnell
2001). In contrast to this approach to sovereignty through the notion of individual agency, Schmitter has focused on the issue of representation and the
institutional structures that provide for mass representation, reconceptualizing
democracy not as a regime, but as a composite of partial regimes, each
of which was institutionalized around distinctive sites for the representation of
social groups . . . (Schmitter 1992, p. 160). Whether or not one accepts
Schmitters reconceptualization of democracy, it usefully points to the multiplicity of sites of representation and emphasizes the importance of those where
societal associations operate.
This chapter examines Latin American democratization from the point of
view of a shift in what I will refer to as the interest regime, or what Schmitter
refers to as the associational system. Because the issue of lower-class representation has been so problematic for democracy in Latin America, I will focus
on the interest regime of the urban popular sector, or the lower and lowermiddle classes, which comprise the majority in the more industrialized Latin
American countries under consideration here.1 This heterogeneous popular
sector represents an aggregation of different strata at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy. As a class category, it is best understood in a Weberian
rather than Marxian sense, in terms of relation to the market rather than
production. Indeed, the shift is from an interest regime centred on a
unionparty hub and based in the formal working class to an interest regime
of urban associationalism based in this more diverse popular sector. While
unions used to be a principal vehicle for popular representation, they are now
only one of a large array of organizations in the emergent associational interest regime.2
The present analysis does not examine organizational activity in the countryside, and, although unions continue to be a part of the new interest regime,
within urban areas it focuses on non-union associations, what will be called
popular associations to refer to organizations by, of, or for the popular
sector or lower classes.3 A further caveat is that the present focus will be on
associations primarily concerned with material issues. Though some analysts
Democratization and the popular interest regime in Latin America
121
emphasize the rise of post-materialist values (Inglehart 1990; Kitschelt

1994), material issues remain at the core of popular concerns outside of the
advanced economies. Popular associations have certainly been concerned with
rights-based issues, and indeed in many Latin American countries they participated in the anti-authoritarian mobilizations. Nevertheless, the preponderance
of popular associations is oriented towards a primary focus on material issues,
especially given the regions macroeconomic crises during the last two
decades.
The analysis begins with an overview of the decline of the unionparty hub
that characterized the popular interest regime in much of post-war Latin
America, particularly those countries that proceeded the furthest with industrialization and are the primary focus of this chapter. It critically examines the argument that the decline of the unionparty hub was an outcome of the process
through which the democratic transition unfolded, preferring an explanation
based in the change to neo-liberal or marketizing economic models. It then
proceeds to an examination of the emerging interest regime. A comparison of the
logic of collective action underlying popular associations and labour unions, the
base-level organizations of the two interest regimes, suggests that popular associations form more easily but have greater difficulty in scaling.4 A subsequent
discussion suggests that although associations generally have greater autonomy,
their relations with the state and political parties are diverse, and in some cases,
states and parties shape associational activities. With some exceptions, states and
parties rarely provide institutional spaces or political access through which associations can exert political influence on national policy.
THE DECLINE OF THE UNION-LBP HUB

The popular interest regime that characterized the more industrialized countries of Latin America throughout much of the last century had at its institutional core a unionparty hub. This interest regime had its roots in the early
stages of industrialization, when a new proletarian class was formed, indeed
made, socially, ideologically and organizationally (Thompson 1963;
Bartolini and Mair 1990; Katznelson and Zolberg 1986; R.B. Collier and D.
Collier 1991). The growth of the proletariat gave rise to two new socio-political technologies: the labour union and the union-affiliated or labour-based
political party (LBP). In Western Europe, the two emerged in tandem as part of
the organizational drive of the socialist movement. Union links with socialist
and communist parties were also established in Latin America. However, in a
large number of countries, unions were legalized under conditions that
displaced these communist and socialist parties in favour of multi-class
populist LBPs, founded by middle-sector interests, often under the leadership
122
of office-holding incumbents, rather than by societal forces from below

(R.B. Collier and D. Collier 1991). In either case, during most of the twentieth century popular-sector interest regimes in Latin America centred on unions
and political parties either populist or leftist which had important links to
labour constituencies and the union movement.
Of course, only a small part of the lower classes participated in unions.
Among wage earners, or proletarians, union density varied substantially, by
country and sector. Further, peasants were rarely included, although Mexico
and Venezuela were exceptions. More importantly for present purposes,
unions did not include the urban informal working class, which grew, particularly starting in the 1950s, with rapid urbanization and the failure of late industrialization to absorb labour at rates comparable to early developers. In the
cities, various types of popular associations, most notably neighbourhood
associations, began to proliferate, particularly in the newly settled squatter
areas. Some of these neighbourhood associations even became important
bases of popular support for national political leaders (D. Collier 1976).
While these associations were certainly a part of the post-war interest
regime, they were nevertheless peripheral, as the popular-sector interest
regime centred on the unionLBP hub. Unionized workers became the most
politically privileged, relevant and mobilized popular-sector actor, benefiting
from state attention and relatively favourable social policy, despite the fact that
a restrictive labour code established a pattern of state corporatism through
which the state controlled the formation, structure, and activities of unions,
and despite the fact that links to populist parties also constrained unions (R.B.
Collier and D. Collier 1979). While unions leveraged their political strength
for particularistic gains for members, they also won broader concessions, such
as subsidies on food and other basic consumption goods that had benefits
across society but were particularly important to the popular sector as a whole.
Since approximately the 1980s, the unionLBP hub has been challenged, if
not eclipsed, and associations, which had been peripheral, have proliferated
and have become more central as structures through which the popular sector
articulates interests and solves collective problems. The decline of the
unionLBP hub corresponds temporally to two global macrosocial transformations: the third wave of democratization and the acceleration of international economic integration. Both were manifested in Latin America as
countries underwent dramatic changes in their political regimes and economic
models. We may consider the impact of each.
Mode of Democratic Transition as Explanation
In most Latin American countries, the third wave of democratization corresponded not only to the transition from authoritarian rule, a field of inquiry
123
that ODonnell and Schmitter (1986, henceforth TAR) shaped for at least two
decades, but more specifically to the transition from military rule. In the large
body of transitions analysis that further developed these ideas, a recurring
theme was that the mode of transition affected the nature of post-authoritarian
regimes. The resultant outcomes under investigation varied, with successor
regime characteristics such as stability, military prerogatives and an array of
democratic deficits receiving particular attention.
We may draw implications from three components of the transitions as
conceptualized in TAR to suggest the hypothesis that the democratization
process unfolded in a way that weakened the unionLBP hub. First, most transitions were conceptualized as elite-led or (implicitly or explicitly) elite-negotiated processes in which the labour movement played only a brief, transitory
role.5 TAR asserted the decline of the people (p. 56), after a momentary
appearance of popular protest in transition politics. Second, in a transitional
process emphasizing pacts between moderate pro-democratic opposition
leaders and authoritarian incumbents, attention was drawn to the incumbents
attempts to protect their interests. These included not only military immunity
and prerogatives, but also the basic ways in which the military had restructured the economy and the polity. Particularly in some cases, at play in these
negotiations or implicit understandings was a continuation of economic
policy, which had often involved wage restraint, a labour law that had curbed
the power of unions, and restrictions on the power of or even the continued
exclusion of left parties. Third, the conception of a game of coup poker
highlighted the fear of an authoritarian backlash that could be provoked by
maximalist demands or protest. Any show of strength by the labour movement could evoke the conditions that had triggered authoritarianism in the first
place: the strength of labour and LBPs had often been the single most important impetus for the advent of military rule, and most of the military regimes
were bureaucratic authoritarian, a regime type in part defined in terms of the
political exclusion of a mobilized labour movement (ODonnell 1979).
This hypothesis that the transition process weakened the unionLBP hub is
not sustained by the evidence. The TAR conceptualization of the transition
suggested a particular framing that caused analysts to miss the influence of
labour movements and their significant democratic accomplishments. Not
marginalized in the transitions, labours participation was nearly universal
and, in general, its active involvement was more prolonged and consequential
than the elite transitions framework suggests.6
Within this generalization, different patterns and a few exceptions can
be discerned. In one pattern (Peru, Argentina), labour protest destabilized and
delegitimated the authoritarian regime, and the government was ultimately
unable to formulate an adequate response. These transitions are better characterized as forced retreat, with LBPs playing central roles in the hastily
124
arranged regime changes. In Peru, LBPs (APRA and leftist parties) won two
thirds of the vote to the Constituent Assembly. Further, the Constituent
Assembly solicited advice from union leaders, as well as from other social
groups. In Argentina, union leaders were important interlocutors in the military withdrawal. Although denied, rumours were widespread that the military
had concluded a pact, not with elites to the exclusion of unions, but precisely
with the unions. Whatever the actual truth concerning such a pact, union leaders were prominent actors in the democratic transition.
In a second pattern (Brazil, Uruguay, Bolivia), the transition started to
unfold more in conformity with the elite-centric TAR pattern, in the context of
a legitimation project adopted by the authoritarian incumbents. In Brazil and
Uruguay, the democratic transition began as an elite strategic game between
authoritarian incumbents and those party leaders allowed to operate in an electoral arena restricted to government-approved political parties. However,
popular pressure, expressed as electoral opposition and protest, was crucial to
undermining these incumbent projects. Elite-centred conceptualizations that
view popular pressure primarily as a resource for the negotiating leaders strip
societal groups of agency and mischaracterize their activities. In fact, labour
opposition worked to undermine government attempts to control and limit the
party system, and it succeeded in creating room for the entry of a political left.
In Brazil, labour protest gave rise to a new socialist party based in a new union
movement. In Uruguay, the reconstitution of the labour movement and its
protest activities provided a front for the banned leftist Frente Amplio, its
participation in various opposition fora and, ultimately, its legalization and
participation in the final negotiations that pushed forward the stalled transition
process. In Bolivia, labour opposition erupted before the party arena opened
and was central from the outset in derailing the governments project for electoral legitimation. The kaleidoscopic events in this particularly complex transition process comprised a game among military, labour and party actors, with
the first two often the primary players.
In three other countries, the labour movement either played a less consequential role (Chile) or was not solidly behind democratization (Ecuador and
Mexico). In Chile, the labour movement led the opposition for about a
decade, starting in 197576. However, it was not able to derail the incumbent
project, and the democratic transition went forward according to the
timetable and the constitution set out and written by the military government
nearly a decade earlier. The situation in Ecuador and Mexico was quite
different: the military regime in Ecuador and the one-party dominant regime
in Mexico included the labour movement in their support base, so that a transition, which was supported by the right, represented substantial uncertainty
in terms of preserving labours political influence, however limited that
influence may have seemed. These, then, were the two unusual cases in
125
which the mainstream labour movement was not active and prominent in the
pro-democracy movement.
Despite this considerable variation, it is clear that when labour movements
were pro-democratic, their role in the transition was generally not limited to
brief, transitory protest. The point is not that these were labour-led transitions,
but rather that unions and LBPs were active participants in the transition
process. The decline of the people (ODonnell and Schmitter 1986) and
myth of moderation (Bermeo 1997) that pervades the transitions literature
flies in the face of the historical record: labour protest continued in Peru until
the elections for Constituent Assembly and in Argentina through the new elections; demonstrations that included labour participation continued in Chile and
accelerated in the final stages in Brazil. In Uruguay the labour movement
continued to flex its muscles through a series of one-day strikes and the 1984
general strike, which substantially changed the balance of power, and as a
result the opposition movement reorganized and consolidated to include the
union movement and various banned left parties. In addition, in several cases,
leaders of unions or LBPs participated in negotiations over the transition or
were members of the constituent assemblies that oversaw the transition and
adopted a new charter.
The important point is that in most cases labour participation in the transitions had the crucial impact of expanding the scope of contestation in the
successor regimes by derailing the intentions of the military incumbents to
exclude any future participation of left and populist LBPs. Labour participation secured the legalization of labour-based parties, whether of Marxist or
populist background. Almost all of the military regimes were established as
transformative regimes with the motivation of excluding precisely these
parties, and through them the labour movement, from the political arena and
from political influence. Yet the authoritarian incumbents were ultimately
prevented from realizing their goal to exorcise these parties.
As a result, in a way that is unprecedented in many of these countries, these
LBPs were admitted as normal participants to the democratic arena. If in
Brazil the Vargas-founded, labour-affiliated PTB had looked threatening to the
right before the 1964 coup, after the transition a new, avowedly socialist PT,
which had its roots in an autonomous and more oppositionist labour movement, had to be admitted to the political arena. If in Argentina the military had
taken power in 1966 because it had essentially run out of civilian options for
excluding the Peronist party, after the transition the Peronists could no longer
be prevented from coming to power. If the Peruvian military took the reins of
government in 1968 in part under a similar impulse, after the transition the
electoral arena had to accept a genuine left as well as APRA, which for the first
time in history came to take power outright. If the Chilean military broke its
long democratic tradition with the goal of permanently banning the Marxist
126
parties that, virtually uniquely in the world, had achieved a democratic electoral victory, at the last minute it had to abandon the prohibition of leftist
parties it had carefully written into the Constitution that would govern the new
democratic regime. If in Uruguay the military had tried to limit the party
system to the traditional two parties, it proved unable to exclude the left and
the unions even from the negotiations, no less from the successor democratic regime.
Furthermore, these reactivated (or, in the case of Brazil, newly founded)
LBPs have often done surprisingly well in the new democracies. The subsequent decline of the unionLBP hub cannot be attributed to the marginalization of these organizations in the transition or the successful collusion of elites
to compromise the position of labour. Rather, the democratic transition significantly widened the space for contestation by LBPs. A more compelling explanation for the decline of the unionLBP hub lies in the turn to the neo-liberal
economic model.
Impact of the New Economic Model
The change in economic model from import substitution industrialization (ISI)
to neo-liberalism, from a protected state-led model to an internationally open
market-oriented model, offers a more convincing explanation of the decline of
the unionLBP hub. The new model has fundamentally changed the social
structural base of politics through widespread privatization of state firms, the
restructuring of private firms, and state reform. Each has resulted in large
layoffs and a change in the labour market, presenting a direct challenge to
unions. Governing LBPs, in turn, have faced the challenge of responding to
the new economic constraints by adopting neo-liberal policies that fray
unionparty ties. Those LBPs that have been successful have, in the process,
substantially restructured the support base of the party; those that have been
unsuccessful in meeting the challenge have met with electoral decline
(Levitsky 2003; Burgess and Levitsky 2003). In both scenarios, the
unionLBP hub has eroded.
The change in the structure of employment has been dramatic. The relative
growth of formally employed wage earners that marked the ISI era has been
followed by their relative stagnation or decline. Portes and Hoffman (2003, p.
49) report that whereas between 1950 and 1980 the public sector had accounted
for 15 per cent of total job growth, more recently public employment has actually shrunk; and whereas large and medium firms in the modern sector had
contributed an additional 45 per cent of total job growth, that sectors share of
employment creation has been reduced to 20 per cent. Thus, although most new
jobs used to be created in the formal sector (60 per cent), in the current period
relative formal employment has declined virtually everywhere.7
127
The effects of these changes in formal employment hit unions especially

hard. By the mid-1990s, union density had dropped, often precipitously,
except in Brazil, where it increased during the 1980s but then levelled off.8
Further, membership has declined precisely in those sectors where unionism
had been especially strong: state firms and key manufacturing sectors. This
change, combined with ongoing efforts in most countries to flexibilize the
employment laws, has put unionized workers on the defensive as a declining
rather than rising group, one which faces an erosion of the boundaries that had
demarcated, even insulated, it from the informal sector.
A parallel change has occurred in the party arena. As has been widely
noted, many governing LBPs have adopted indeed, initiated neo-liberal
policies that contravene the interests of unionized workers. This change in
economic orientation has brought about a coalitional change as LBPs have
ceased to rely on unions as their core base of support and have restructured
their constituencies, turning increasingly away from unionized workers and
towards informal workers. In the process, LBPs have also turned away from
class-oriented ideologies or discourses, as seen perhaps most dramatically in
the abandonment by the Mexican PRI of any revolutionary discourse and the
altered discourse of the PT in Brazil as it became a serious contender for
national power. These changes have been divisive, and in 2005 the PT suffered
several internal challenges. Robertss (forthcoming) analysis of party systems
in Latin America demonstrates the extent to which LBPs and the party systems
based on them have been particularly vulnerable to decomposition or transformation, experiencing the greatest volatility, discontinuity and dislocation.
The new economic model, then, has weakened unions and transformed their
relationships with political parties. The day of the classic mass party that drew
its core support and mobilizing strategy from union organization has been
eclipsed. The result has been a disempowering of the unionLBP hub within
the popular interest regime.
THE EMERGING INTEREST REGIME

Amid the upheaval of democratization and marketization, Latin America has
witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of societal organizations, whose
heterogeneity is reflected in the proliferation of labels: for example, civil society organizations, social movement organizations, community organizations,
grass-roots organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and advocacy groups. The term popular associations used here embraces this associational diversity, delimiting the category not by organizational characteristics but
by socio-economic constituency. With the rise of these organizations, the relative weakening of unions, and the change in the nature of LBP linkages to unions
128
and civil society more generally, many analysts have posited a change from an
interest regime centred on the unionLBP hub to one based on associational
networks (Chalmers et al. 1997; Korzeniewicz and Smith 2000). As noted
above, popular associations in some form have long existed in Latin America,
but their prevalence and political importance were quite limited during most of
the twentieth century. It was not until the 1970s and 1980s that civil society
became more dense and active and that associationalism began to thrive, gathering strength during authoritarian openings and escalating with the transition
process and economic crisis. The resurrection of civil society noted by
ODonnell and Schmitter is in this sense better understood as a genesis.
Both third wave democratization and economic changes were important
factors in the rise of associationalism. While it was argued above that the mode
of democratic transition did not weaken the union-based character of the interest regime, democratization did have a role in stimulating the proliferation of
associations. Human rights groups, including those in popular neighbourhoods, were often early organizers in the anti-authoritarian struggle. While this
type of rights-based activism diminished after the transition, it was an important part of the more general upsurge in associationalism (Foweraker 2001),
supported both by transnational advocacy groups and official sources of
foreign aid (Keck and Sikkink 1998).
The change in economic model was also a major factor in stimulating the
rise of popular-sector associationalism. The neo-liberal era has been crisis
prone, and many countries have experienced periods of declining real wages
as well as increasing poverty or at best a halt to its downward trend. Popularsector organizing around subsistence issues, which received a big impetus
from the debt crisis of the 1980s, has been sustained as a way of coping in the
face of ongoing hardship, so that various types of survival associations, such
as those providing food, have proliferated in popular neighbourhoods.
Furthermore, targeted state social programmes adopted in some countries have
relied on associational partners in civil society as a mechanism for implementation. The reduced role of the state has also been a factor, and many associations have been formed as self-help groups to supply goods and services in
areas where the state has withdrawn or will not commit sufficient resources.
The associational world is both incredibly heterogeneous and still emergent, posing a steep challenge for description and theorizing. The diversity of
organizations makes it difficult to conceptualize popular associations as an
organizational category and the associational interest regime as a coherent
system of interest representation. Moreover, dynamics within the associational world are sensitive both to the neo-liberal economic model, which
some countries may be adjusting after two decades of slow growth without
concomitant reductions in poverty and inequality, and to the level of political
decentralization, which also has been changing over the last decade. Bearing
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in mind these heterogeneous and emergent qualities, it is nevertheless possible to draw some key contrasts between the emergent interest regime with
associations as the base organizational unit and the earlier interest regime
with unions as the base organizational unit.
AN ASSOCIATIONAL LOGIC OF COLLECTIVE ACTION

A first task in analysing the emergent associational interest regime is to
compare the logic of collective action of associations and unions. Olsons
original formulation of collective action problems included an analysis of
unions (Olson 1965). Subsequent research has drawn a distinction between
those organizational challenges faced by capitalists and those faced by the
working class in industrial societies. In this vein, scholars have stressed
both the more onerous problems of collective action faced by labour
compared with capital (Offe and Wiesenthal 1980) and the further asymmetry that the market mechanism provides a degree of coordination that mitigates the need for concerted collective action among capitalists, especially
regarding the application of sanctions (Lindblom 1977). Scholars have
further disaggregated the capitalist side of this dichotomy, positing that
differences in sector (Streeck 1990; Bowman 1989) and size of enterprise
(Shadlen 2004) lead to distinct logics of collective action. Analyses have
also pointed to the relative strengths or weaknesses of working-class
groups, differentiating them according to their structural and associational
power (Wright 2000, p. 962; see also Silver 2003, p. 13), for example, size
of plant, isolated enclaves, competitive v. non-competitive sectors, skill
levels, craft v. industrial organizations.
These analyses, rooted primarily in the experiences of early developers, are
oriented towards wage-earners and do not consider what in Latin America is
the larger group among the working classes: informal workers, who are more
likely to pursue class or material interests through consumptionist rather than
productionist organizations. It is this basic distinction, between unions and
non-union associations, that provides the first cut in the present attempt to
differentiate systematically the logic of collective action underlying the earlier
and emergent interest regime. In beginning an analysis of this differentiation,
the following argument does not claim a universal logic of collective action for
popular associations across all nations. Rather, it should be understood only to
apply to countries exhibiting certain social structural characteristics high
levels of inequality, informality and poverty common but not exclusive to
Latin America. In this context, most popular associations are formed by
resource-poor groups, primarily to advance discrete material demands or to
serve material needs. This type of popular organizing should be differentiated
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from that of better funded, often middle-class, citizen groups in advanced

industrial countries.
Two types of collective action problems may be distinguished. The first is
the fundamental question of collective action within base-level organizations.
How do interest associations form and to what general patterns do they
conform in their operation? The second is the question of collective action
among or across organizations with compatible interests and agendas.9 How
do interest associations scale or act in concert in terms of either the routinized
horizontal coordination of activities or the vertical formation of superordinate
(con)federations, fronts, or coordinating structures? The distinction between
collective action within and among organizations is important because it bears
directly on a central difference between labour unions and popular associations: labour unions tend to have significant difficulty with organizational
formation but substantial ability to coordinate and scale. In contrast, the opposite is true for popular associations. Needless to say, substantial variation
exists among unions and, to an even greater extent perhaps, among associations. Nevertheless, despite the diversity within these categories, a general
contrast may be drawn.
This contrast rests on three characteristics that combine to shape the logic
of collective action of unions and popular associations. These are (a)
resources: constituency participation and finances, (b) ideational cohesion:
shared interests and collective identity within and between base organizations,
and (c) the nature of demands: the degree to which they are fulfillable in the
near term, and their disaggregability (Table 5.1).
In the following discussion it will become clear that these organizational
characteristics may be affected by external factors. For instance, one clearly
important distinction between unions and popular associations is that the
former are regulated by labour law. In addition to outright constraints on union
organization and activities, other legal provisions have been seen as inducements, or double-edged regulations, in that they serve as both organizational
benefits and controls (R.B. Collier and D. Collier 1979). These provisions,
such as registration and state recognition requirements and compulsory
membership laws, tend to help extant unions scale and sustain themselves,
while making opposition union formation difficult by creating barriers to
entry. No comparable legal framework governs popular associations.
Ideational factors are also at least in part external while ideology might be a
characteristic of an organization, no one would argue that it is completely
internally generated. And, of course, some associations receive support from
external NGOs. Nevertheless, the internal characteristics highlighted below
can be seen as important proximate causes that shape the logic of collective
action of each type of organization.
Table 5.1 Organizational differences and implications for collective action

Variables
Resources
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Cohesion
Nature of
demands
Unions
Associations
Advantages in:
Formation
Scaling
Participants
legally sanctioned formal

members
varies, but generally not

formal members
Unions:
Assoc: +
Unions: +
Assoc:
Finances
significant; future level of

resources relatively clear;
self-funded
varies, but rarely both

significant and self-funded
Unions:
Assoc: +
Unions: +
Assoc:
Shared interests
varies, but significant both

within and between unions
very significant within

associations, less between
Unions:
Assoc: +
Unions: +
Assoc:
Shared identity
high within unions, high

among unions
high within and low

among associations
Unions: +
Assoc: +/
Unions: +
Assoc:
Disaggregability
of policy area
varies, but often

non-disaggreable
generally disaggregable
Unions:
Assoc: +
Unions: +
Assoc:
Feasibility
generally feasible, concrete,

material demands despite
some historic orientation
towards socialism
generally feasible, concrete,

material demands
Unions: +
Assoc: +
Unions: +/
Assoc:
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Organizational Resources
Labour unions and popular associations are quite distinct types of organization
in terms of the resources at their command. Two differences are the nature of
participation and the type of financing of base-level organizations. Labour
unions and popular associations differ significantly in the manner by which
they attract and retain participants. Unions have formal members, usually
drawn from a delimited group of individuals who are employed in similar
circumstances. Membership is strictly defined, and the rights and responsibilities of members are clearly delineated. In many instances, as mentioned
above, the government legally mandates that this membership be compulsory
for all employees in a given workplace; such labour code regulations historically have been among the most salient inducements offered to the labour
movement by the state.
Popular associations exhibit considerably more variation than unions in the
nature of participation, but rarely do they have formal members. Exceptions of
course exist, such as some associations of street vendors (Roever 2005). In
most cases, however, it is probably a misnomer to speak of membership at all.
Rather, these associations have participants, whose involvement is voluntary
and often intermittent. Finally, many associations in Latin America are
engaged in a type of activity, for instance service provision, that makes it more
accurate to divide participants into staff either volunteer or paid and
constituents, clients or beneficiaries, with some individuals straddling the two
categories.
Formal membership, with its attendant participation and financial commitments, generally hinders collective action for forming new unions. In contrast,
the more flexible models of participation that characterize most popular associations tend to facilitate their formation. Attracting participants is easier if
demands on them are not so clearly defined or can be tailored to fit their level
of enthusiasm. The inverse relationship holds regarding the way these internal
organizational characteristics affect the ability of organizations to scale.
Formal membership facilitates cooperation and scaling among unions, as leaders are able to pursue long-term strategic goals that may impose short-term
costs without fear of defection. The participation models of associations tend
to make scaling more difficult. The long-term planning and investments of
time and resources necessary for collective action among associations may
cause individual participants with more immediate goals to lose interest.
Partly as a result of their formal memberships, unions also tend to have
larger and more predictable resource pools at their disposal than associations,
although significant variation can again be found among associations. Union
dues provide predictable funding for day-to-day operations, professional staff,
and long-term budgetary and strategic planning. Associations are less likely to
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have ample resource pools and the ability to make long-term budgetary forecasts. Grass-roots or community associations tend to have less capacity to
extract resources from what are usually poorer participants. Although most are
at least partially self-funded, many tend to be dependent on outside sources of
funding, such as the state, political parties, NGOs or international donors. This
grant-based funding can vary greatly along multiple dimensions, including the
overall level of funding, the degree to which funding is secured in advance and
the formal or informal constraints imposed by donors. Some popular associations may be amply funded and enter into medium to long-term funding relationships with a given donor; but even then the necessity of renewing the grant
puts some limit on associations capacity to make plans well into the future.
Much more commonly, popular associations struggle, or may even compete,
to ensure funding in advance or find funding at all.
The means by which unions extract resources and budget can hinder initial
formation but aid in subsequent lobbying and collective action with other
labour organizations. Conversely, the negligible cost of participating tends to
facilitate associational formation, but the scant resources and inability to make
stable budget forecasts of many associations tend to hinder institutionalized
scaling and cooperation.
Ideational Cohesion
While differences in organizational resources can provide substantial leverage
concerning the disparate logics of collective action underlying labour unions
and popular associations, ideational factors must also be considered. An
important point made by Offe and Wiesenthal in their discussion of collective
action among labour and capital can be used to frame this discussion. In their
exposition of the classic labourcapital dichotomy, they posit that labour faces
a particular problem of interest heterogeneity, which, following Olson, they
attribute primarily to the large number of individual participants. Offe and
Wiesenthals answer, one also posited in much historiography of the labour
movement, is that a collective identity among workers must be constructed to
overcome this obstacle, a somewhat paradoxical dynamic in which interests
can only be met to the extent that they are partly redefined (Offe and
Wiesenthal 1980, p. 81). It thus may be useful to consider both interest heterogeneity and collective identity as ideational factors shaping the logic of collective action of unions and popular associations both within organizations and
across them.
Individual associations may tend to exhibit less interest heterogeneity
among members than individual unions. Associations attract participants who
have specific interests in common for example, neighbours may participate
in neighbourhood associations for specific infrastructural projects, or vendors
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may cooperate to secure space on the streets when its use is threatened. This
commonality of interest within associations is reinforced by the fact that participation is voluntary and membership not institutionalized, so that barriers to
exit are low, and dissidents or participants with divergent views can simply
leave the organization. These traits tend to facilitate association formation.
Within labour unions interest heterogeneity is likely to be somewhat
greater, since once unions are initially established, membership is often either
legally or contractually compulsory and there are no easy exit options. As a
result, unions tend to be more difficult to form and/or some participants will
be disgruntled or at odds with the direction or strategy of the organization. Of
course, union organization itself serves an important homogenizing function.
In a free labour market, workers compete against one another, driving wages
down and making interest heterogeneity endemic to proletarian existence.
Unions partially solve this problem of inter-worker competition, and to some
extent homogenize the interests of members. But this effect ameliorates a
problem that associations do not have to begin with. On the whole then,
greater interest heterogeneity within unions creates more significant problems
for collective action for formation when compared to associations.10
By contrast, at an aggregated level across individual units, the associational
world covers a more heterogeneous set of interests than the organized labour
movement, making scaling and coordination more difficult for associations.
The union movement embraces a restricted subgroup of the popular sector,
while the set of associations is potentially all-encompassing. The work situations of participants in associations vary widely. While most are in the informal sector, others are formal workers or are openly unemployed, having been
laid off from formal work. Further, even informal workers are a diverse category, sometimes explicitly defined as including wage earners, microentrepreneurs who hire them, domestic workers, and the self-employed. Unlike
members of labour unions, these participants do not share a common target of
work-related grievances. Indeed, most associations have nothing to do with
relations of production at all, but focus on a great variety of consumptionist
issues. Interest heterogeneity across unions, particularly among those within a
given economic sector, is not likely to be so great. Even across sectors, unions
tend to have common interests in many macro-level policies, such as those that
protect jobs, set minimum wages as a benchmark, and regulate individual
contracts and collective rights. And even when union interests differ by sector,
the most important of these sectoral unions are generally large and cohesive
enough to scale and often to win bargaining rights at the national level.
The second aspect of ideational cohesion is collective identity among participants, which, as Offe and Wiesenthal note, may mitigate problems of interest
heterogeneity. Unions might be seen as drawing on two sources of identity. The
first is the highly elaborated ideology of the Marxist or quasi-Marxist left,
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which has a long history in unionism in Latin America and which, at least to
some degree, has historically imparted a class identity to unionized workers.
In addition, the affiliation of unions to LBPs, through institutionalized organizational links, interlocking leadership or a history of collaboration, has often
given unionized workers a common partisan identity. Moreover, until the
current period political parties could be arrayed on a leftright programmatic
continuum, and political battles occurred along that materialist cleavage.
Hence, ideology and party identification reinforced or constructed an
ideational commonality across base-level unions. Overall, this relative cohesion across labour organizations facilitates scaling and cooperation.
While it is difficult to generalize about collective identity within associations, across them collective identity seems generally weak. Many observers
have seen in the associational world a common discourse of rights and grassroots, participatory democracy. A substantive tenet is an aversion to hierarchy
and bureaucracy, making certain kinds of institutionalized vertical arrangements for collective action among associations less likely. Further, a vague
ideological mooring should not be conflated with a strong and cohesive collective identity. While Offe and Wiesenthal offer an important insight by noting
that collective identity can help overcome the problem of interest heterogeneity, such an identity may not be readily available when interests are as fragmented as they are in the associational world. The concept of the popular
sector denotes a group that shares a relative position in the market, but which
aggregates a range of lower socio-economic strata and positions regarding
employment. The informal sector, the popular sector and the working classes
are not just concepts that bedevil social scientists, but also lived realities,
experiential fuzzy sets. If scholars have so much trouble determining who is
in and who is out, then it is no wonder that a sense of commonality is difficult
to construct on the ground (Peattie 1987).
Nature of Demands
A final factor shaping the logic of collective action is the nature of the
demands central to each type of organization. Most urban popular associations
and unions advance concrete, material demands that are quite different from
the transformative, virtually unbounded, post-material demands typical of the
new social movements. Though the latter do make more specific deliverable demands, dominating their larger agenda is usually a much broader
demand that is ultimately unfeasible within any reasonable time frame. Even
a responsive government can only partially satisfy demands for peace, environmental protection, racial and gender equality, or the end of nuclear proliferation. This fact is a powerful inducement for continued organization and
mobilization; indeed, responsiveness on the part of the government may
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further energize rather than demobilize such movements. Such transformative

and long-term orientations also provide a common, salient goal that subsumes
the many immediate, concrete demands made by individual associations,
thereby uniting the larger network. The opposite relationship exists for unions
and especially for popular associations. While some unions have had a longterm socialist or redistributive vision, economism has been the prevailing
orientation, with a focus on demands that are immediate and feasible in principle (even if not politically), such as wage increases. Similarly, most demands
of popular associations are also immediate and fulfillable, such as food subsidies, works programmes, urban services, infrastructure investments or land
titles. Evidence among popular neighbourhood associations suggests that
having these demands fulfilled is more likely to demobilize than energize
associations (Dosh 2004). This outcome affects associations more than unions
because of the permanent, legal standing of unions.
A related point concerns whether demands are directed towards policies
that are easy or difficult to disaggregate in terms of constituencies, or the
degree to which demands are for targetable or excludable goods. The above
examples of associational demands can be disaggregated, in the sense that a
government response can be targeted to one association and withheld from
another. Lowi (1964) insightfully argued that policies that lend themselves to
disaggregation display different patterns of group contestation and are played
out in different political arenas, or through different policy processes, from
those not easily subdivided. A fundamental observation was that different
types of actors are the primary political units in each policy arena: peak associations weigh in on redistributive issues, coalitions of more discrete interest
groups tend to contest regulatory policy, and individuals, firms or small interest groups operate in the distributive arena of disaggregable policy. This fit
between interest groups and policy type helps us understand the differing logic
of collective action of unions and popular associations.
While unions and associations may have multifaceted agendas and make a
variety of demands that differ in their ease of disaggregation, it is possible to
draw some general distinctions and posit some basic implications. Generally,
while much union activism occurs at the plant level, key political demands of
organized labour have traditionally been directed toward redistributive or
regulatory policy areas that are not easily disaggregated for example, labour
market regulation, legal provisions that regulate unions and their activities,
policies toward the public sector and heavily unionized private firms, and
macroeconomic policy. This non-disaggregability may provide slight discouragement for base-level union formation but greatly increases incentives for
scaling.
By contrast, the disaggregability of the distributive policies typical of associational demand-making provides an incentive to associational formation,
137
since success is more likely when the response is cheap (as it is when targeted),
and would-be participants are more likely to join an effort that promises to reap
quick rewards. However, the piecemeal, even discretionary, response to these
demands a sidewalk here, a health clinic there is conducive to clientelism
and cooptation and discourages the establishment of ongoing, institutionalized
relations of cooperation among associations. Some associations may, of course,
have a larger and national political agenda, for example, health and education policies, active labour market policies, poverty relief, and tax and redistributive policies. However, most associations focus on disaggregable
demands, and the fact that core demands can be satisfied individually lowers
the incentives for cooperation and scaling. Indeed, precisely because it is more
easily attainable, associations may have an incentive to demand a particular
subsidy or distribution for just one neighbourhood, rather than to present the
demand as a form of entitlement for all similar neighbourhoods.
ASSOCIATIONAL RELATIONSHIPS WITH STATES

AND PARTIES
The logic of collective action of popular associations offers some basic
insights into the emerging interest regime, but equally fundamental are the
ways associations are inserted into politics, and their relationship to the state
and political parties. All of these factors affect the capacity of associations to
aggregate and articulate popular demands and to exert political influence. In
the earlier popular interest regime, both the state and political parties helped
unions solve these problems of formation and scaling. Yet, these relationships
were double-edged: unions were generally inserted into the polity in a way
that reduced their autonomy and responsiveness to the rank-and-file. Given the
many types of associations, relationships with the state and with parties take
many forms, and generalization is therefore difficult. However, associations
do not necessarily escape the problems of maintaining autonomy. Rather, as
many have come to recognize, associational activity is shaped by both the state
and partisan alignment, albeit significantly less so than in the earlier interest
regime. Furthermore, while these relationships can help associations scale,
this aid is neither as pervasive nor as strong.
Another issue concerns the influence of popular organizations on macro
policy and the way the interest regime fits into the pattern of politics writ large.
Despite the many controls that derived from their relationships with the state
and political parties, in most Latin American countries unions were able to
gain some degree of influence over important macroeconomic and regulatory
policy issues. Associations have not been able to gain commensurate influence, in large part because of difficulties in scaling, their relationship to parties
138
and the orientation of state policy. While some interesting national variations
have emerged, the disarticulation from national politics is a general characteristic of associations in the new interest regime.
AssociationState Relationships
Many analysts initially conceptualized popular associations in Latin America
in terms of civil society or new social movements, pointing to their relative
autonomy from the state and contrasting them with unions, historically
plagued by varying degrees of state penetration and control. Yet while the
associational world in the region may be more autonomous when viewed in
the aggregate, this general assessment masks substantial heterogeneity in associationstate relations. At the extreme, some associations are actually formed
by the state or with the active encouragement of the state. But the role of the
state need not be so direct in order to raise issues of associational autonomy.
The formation, subsequent behaviour and substantive agendas of associations
are often shaped by state programmes and activities in more subtle ways, with
associationstate relationships taking on a diversity of configurations.
One way to assess the relationship between the state and those associations
not directly sponsored by the state is to consider four questions:
1. Does the association interact with the state at all?
2. Does the association rely on the state for resources?
3. Does associationstate interaction predominantly revolve around one
specific state programme?
4. Does the association primarily serve in the implementation of that
programme, rather than make demands?
Response patterns should form a cumulative scale measuring the degree of
associational autonomy. At one end, associational autonomy is substantial.
During the ravages of the lost decade of the 1980s and at other subsequent
times of hardship, Latin America witnessed a growth of popular associations
engaged in self-provisioning functions for communities, such as organizing
neighbourhood crime watches and providing a local safety net. Lacking any
direct relationship with the state, these self-provisioning organizations might
be understood as the most autonomous (though non-state donors may shape
priorities).
Most associations, however, do interact with the state, leading to a diverse
set of associationstate relationships marked by varying levels of associational
autonomy. One distinction within this subset is between associations that rely
on the state for resources and those that do not. Some popular associations
share information with the state or are regulated by the state but do not make
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demands for state resources or serve to implement state programmes. These

associations, which do not have a material reliance on the state, tend to be
more autonomous by avoiding the power of the purse strings.
In many cases, however, associational behaviour is influenced by the state,
sometimes unintentionally. The very existence of certain state programmes
shapes the agenda and activities of many associations and thereby, to some
extent, the profile of the larger associational regime. State programmes signal
a priority on particular demands directed at specific targets, such as certain
agencies and budget lines. As a consequence, associations may turn away from
or give less priority to other substantive goals. At the same time, precisely by
reducing the active alternatives or prioritizing particular ones, these
programmes may reduce the collective action problem of associations by coordinating and focusing their activities in a common direction. Perhaps the best
example is the way many associations have coordinated to demand state
labour programmes in Argentina. Furthermore, the existence of these
programmes has diverted the energy and demands of associations from other
approaches to welfare and income support (Garay 2004).
A further distinction can be made between those associations that make a
variety of different claims in response to changing circumstances and those
whose activities revolve around a specific state programme. Both interact with
the state but the former are likely to remain somewhat more autonomous.
Associations whose activity revolves around a specific state programme run
the risk of becoming overly dependent on that programme and its bureaucratic
functionaries and finding themselves in an exchange relationship in which
resources are traded for autonomy. Among associations in this position, the
danger of state control may be particularly great for those that are not targeting demands toward a specific programme but implementing it. Although it is
difficult to assess the prevalence of this phenomenon, in which associations
serve as a privatized arm of a retrenching state for the purposes of social
service delivery, it seems to be quite widespread. Again, it is often the priorities of the state its policy direction and programmatic orientation that
encourage the formation of specific kinds of associations and direct their
activities in a particular way.
AssociationParty Relationships
Many analysts have noted that the roles of political parties have changed in
Latin Americas neo-liberal democracies, particularly in their relationship to
constituencies. Parties were central in the earlier popular interest regime.
LBPs affiliated unions through formal organizational integration, interlocking
leadership or close coordination. Unions were important resources in electoral
campaigns, cementing party identification and mobilizing the vote. Parties, in
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turn, provided a channel of access and some degree of influence for unions in
politics at all levels, from municipal to national. This exchange, including
these benefits of party affiliation, came at the widely analysed price of subordination of unions to the party. The trade-off was particularly severe in the
case of governing populist parties, but the subordination to party-electoral
goals was also a feature of classist parties, like the Socialist party in Chile.
Nevertheless, to different degrees, these relationships afforded organized
labour a vehicle for representation, offered some degree of input into major
policy areas and helped unions coordinate their efforts politically.
Compared with the unionLBP hub, relationships between popular associations and parties, when they exist at all, tend to be characterized by greater
associational autonomy and less formal organizational integration.
Associations do not have an institutionalized presence in political parties that
is comparable, for example, to the PRIs labour sector in Mexico, the PJs
tercio in Argentina or ADs labour bureaus in Venezuela, in the earlier interest
regime. In general, and in a way that affects unions as well, parties now have
more distant relationships to societal groups, a widely noted dynamic also at
work in advanced industrial countries (Katz and Mair 1995). As Roberts has
argued for Latin America, the neo-liberal critical juncture has undermined
. . . mass parties and led to a proliferation of individualized linkages to
machine, personalist, or professional-electoral parties . . . A more fragmented,
autonomous, and pluralistic civil society . . . [now has] fluid and tenuous linkages to party organizations (pp. 67, 45).
Within this general commonality, associationparty relationships vary
substantially from country to country and also within countries, as these
linkages are not uniform across geographic areas or across different
networks of associations. Some ties are quite different from these individualized, often patronage-based, linkages. In Venezuela, facing a situation in
which economic constraints are eased and domestic opposition is fierce and
even undemocratic, Hugo Chvez and his MVR have mobilized a substantial support base. A major vehicle, encouraged by Chvez since 2000
through a variety of inducements, has been the crculos bolivarianos, associations which range from a handful to a few hundred members and are
primarily involved in neighbourhood improvement and service provision
(Hawkins and Hansen 2006). The formation of these crculos seems to have
taken place through some combination of bottom-up and top-down
processes, but the relationship between the crculos and the MVR requires
further research.
Brazils PT emerged out of a pro-democratic social movement in which a
heterogeneous set of popular-sector organizations took part, both new labour
unions and popular associations. Reflecting this bottom-up formation, the
party has traditionally held a strong ideological commitment to internal
141
participatory and democratic procedures. In accordance with this orientation,

at the local level the party has designed and implemented participatory institutions, most notably participatory budgeting, that allow popular associations
to assume a larger role in subnational (state and municipal) policy-making
(Goldfrank 2002). These institutions have succeeded in regularizing access to
government for popular associations and encouraging the formation and
survival of new associations as well as increased policy responsiveness. At the
same time, they must be viewed as a partisan strategy to mobilize support in
the context of electoral competition among centre-left parties (Goldfrank and
Schneider 2005). These participatory institutions, however, have not been
sustainable beyond the municipal level, and PT President da Silva thus far
appears reluctant to implement such strategies nationally.
The remarkable adaptation of Argentinas Peronists (PJ) to the neo-liberal
era has attracted significant scholarly attention. The major labour confederation remains linked to the party, but unionparty relations are now more
distant, as can be seen both in the founding of a rival non-Peronist labour
confederation and the transformation of the PJ from a more classic LBP
(indeed, one in which labour for many years was dominant in relation to the
party) to a party machine based in neighbourhood brokers to mobilize support
(Levitsky 2003). Relying both on historical partisan identities and extensive
clientelistic distributions, local party officials serve as patrons to individual
clients and also to a variety of popular associations. While some popular associations remain distant from the PJ, others have close links. As the associations
of the unemployed, the piqueteros, have grown and gained prominence, some
of the most influential of these associations have aligned with President
Kirchners faction of the PJ and have modified their activities in order to
support him (Garay 2004). A new institution, the Mesa Coordinadora para un
Nuevo Proyecto Nacional, was formed by these more accommodationist
piquetero groups and the Kirchner faction to coordinate and cement their relations, but the future of this initiative is unclear.
Macro Policy
The associational interest regime affords the popular sectors less capacity to
affect macro policy at the national level than did the interest regime dominated
by the unionLBP hub. This more limited influence is in part due to the greater
difficulty of associations in scaling as well as a different relation to political
parties. Under the old interest regime, the labour movement had a presence,
albeit with varying influence, in national politics through labour confederations, which provided a voice in negotiations and a capacity to mobilize and
protest, and through party linkages, which afforded access at the national
level. By contrast, while some associations may have some points of access,
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these tend to be limited, and peak associations that are in institutionalized

political dialogue on national economic and social policy are rare.
Potential popular-sector influence at the national level is also dependent on
the overall economic model, as Garretn et al. (2003) have highlighted in their
discussion of the new sociopolitical matrix in Latin America. The fundamentally different roles of the state under import substitution and neo-liberalism lead to distinct patterns of demand-making in terms of what policies are
contestable and the level of the state where contestation takes place.
The unionLBP hub predominated in a particular economic context that
oriented demand-making toward the national state. Parallel to the Fordist logic
of the Keynesian welfare state, ISI encouraged a form of organized capitalism that favoured encompassing peak associations of labour and demandmaking focused on policies at the national level. ISI was characterized by a
large public sector (including state-owned firms and a state bureaucracy that
were important sources of employment), the promotion of national industry,
and (peripheral) Fordist regulation of the economy (Lipietz 1987) that both
promoted production on the supply side and implemented policies that
sustained aggregate demand. The demand-side logic of this inward growth
model made room for the state to adopt national level policies that would help
solve collective action problems of both workers and employers and reduce
competition between as well as within those classes. Pro-union and proworker policies rigidities in the labour market, minimum wages and rising
wages in line with productivity gains, subsidies on basic consumption items,
and health care and pensions increased aggregate demand for national
producers in settings where small markets were often limiting. Along with
protectionist measures, the adoption of these policies at the national level
helped remove certain labour cost pressures from competition among employers, while increasing aggregate demand, in which inwardly oriented producers
had a collective interest. The degree to which these policies were put in place
varied according to the configuration of political coalitions, their institutionalization in party systems and the resulting political dynamics.
With the implementation of the neo-liberal model, states have withdrawn
from former areas of economic intervention and from many of the national
policies that had been the focus of national-level demand-making. The privatization of pensions and removal of subsidies on basic consumption goods are
examples. These changes have removed important policy areas from the agenda
of demand-making, as Kurtz (2004) demonstrates for the rural sector. The
effects on the new interest regime may be seen regarding unions as well as
associations. Despite their ongoing advantage in scaling, unions have less influence in the new interest regime. They may retain some national clout in particular areas, and in some countries they have been influential in labour reform,
limiting the flexibilization of the labour market regarding both individual
143
employment and collective rights. However, even the Argentine labour movement, historically the regions strongest, was not able to influence macroeconomic policy, although union leaders were able to negotiate certain
compensations to unions in return for acceding to detrimental and costly
reforms (Etchemendy 2004).
Another aspect of the neo-liberal model with implications for demandmaking is the decentralization of the state. Many Latin American countries
have devolved programmatic initiatives and budgetary control of various policies to lower levels of government. The devolution of social and neighbourhood services, around which popular associations are most likely to make
demands, has been especially prevalent. These changes have opened up new
spaces for interest intermediation between their constituencies and a more
proximate and presumably accessible level of the state. The result has often
been greater responsiveness to grass-roots demands, though experiments with
deepening democracy through direct participation have varied substantially.11 However, with greater attention focused at lower levels of government
regarding immediate demands, the incentives for scaling and national coordination are again reduced.
In many cases, then, there has been a trade-off in which popular-sector
access to certain kinds of policy areas, especially those that are disaggregated
and oriented to the neighbourhood, has improved while capacity to affect
macro policy at the national level has eroded. While many staples of the ISI
era have been taken off the agenda, many significant policy areas that directly
affect the constituencies of associations, most notably social policy, are still
contested at the national level. Yet with some exceptions, such as Argentinas
piqueteros and some associations in Brazil, popular associations have not been
able to coordinate and influence decisions on social policy and other second
generation reforms.
CONCLUSION
A shift in the popular-sector interest regime, although not labelled as such, has
been widely noted. In the emergent interest regime, the role of unions has
become less central, and a great array of popular organizations, of which
unions are now just one type, has become prominent. Initial assessments of
these other popular associations were optimistic, lauding the strengthening of
civil society in political systems that historically lacked structures capable of
making government accountable, of representing the majority or of sustaining
democratic regimes. Particular traits of associations were also seen as beneficial. Unlike unions, associations relate to one another in networks rather than
in the hierarchical and bureaucratic structures from which Michels derived his
144
iron law of oligarchy. Conceptualized as internally participatory, they were

often seen as efficacy-promoting schools for democracy and potential building blocks of an inclusionary system of representation responsive to the grass
roots. Furthermore, some analysts have been sanguine or at least hopeful
that associations could move into the representational void being vacated or
unfilled by political parties, which are widely seen as becoming socially
disembedded and engaging in audience politics in the electoral arena (Manin
1997). After an initial period of enthusiasm, however, many scholars of Latin
America have turned markedly more pessimistic, noting the inability of associations to apply pressure to political elites and meaningfully affect macropolitical outcomes, seeing not schools for democracy but a crisis of popular
representation.
In exploring the emergent interest regime, this chapter has tried to lay bare
its distinct logic of collective action compared to that of the union-based
regime. The associational regime is characterized by easy entry: unlike unions,
associations form readily and have proliferated dramatically. The associational
interest regime is potentially all-encompassing, with unrestricted constituencies and agendas, thereby excluding no groups or interests. At the same time,
associations face the fundamental problem of scaling, which derives from
limited resources, heterogeneity of interests and the nature of demands. This
problem is reinforced by changes in party politics and associationparty relations and by the neo-liberal model, which in crucial areas has redefined the
nature of state policy and the locus of policy-making.
As Schmitter suggested, the partial regimes in which associations operate
are important sites of representation and hence central for distinguishing types
of democracy. The associational interest regime in Latin America is characterized by some representational tensions that may be endemic. While popular
associations may spur participation, gain access and win influence in areas of
policy at the local level, they have largely been cut off from influence at the
national level. The overall interest regime tends to be caught in a distributional
pattern of local politics. And while the associational world as a whole may be
characterized by greater autonomy from the state and parties, state policy
nevertheless often shapes the overall set of claims, and partisan affiliation or
insertion in electoral politics can moderate or subordinate the demands of
associations.
Nevertheless, these tensions play out in diverse ways in different national
settings. In Chile, associations have shown little ability to coordinate and
affect major policy areas. Yet across the Andes in Argentina, the piqueteros
have succeeded in scaling, displaying enormous mobilizational capacity at the
national level and achieving quasi-institutionalized or at least regularized
access to social policy-making. In a complex and interactive political process,
a state works programme has shaped the nature of the demands of the
145
piqueteros, who have succeeded in expanding the programme tremendously,

while the process has crowded out programmatic alternatives regarding
income support or poverty reduction. While an interesting exception to the
general pattern of associational exclusion from national policy-making, this
pattern is unlikely to be replicated broadly. However, other political processes
may shape national interest regimes in a particular direction. For instance, in
Venezuela Chvez has not only induced the formation of a quasi-affiliated
network of associations, but in so doing he has primed a national political
cleavage in aligning a social-structural division, societal organization and a
cultural or ideological orientation (Bartolini and Mair 1990). This reshaping
of the interest regime in Venezuela has been a central aspect of a general reorientation and unique polarization of politics.
Analysis of national interest regimes and their consequences for popular
representation is still at a preliminary stage. The key questions concern how
much political clout associations are able to gain, and how associations confront
the classical dilemma between political access and influence, on the one hand,
and autonomy, on the other. Garretn (1994, p. 245) has suggested that moving
beyond this trade-off may involve the role of the state itself in constituting
spaces and institutions within which actors can come forth who are autonomous
with regard to the state without being marginal. If the trade-off is indeed resolvable, the question for analysts becomes the conditions under which the interaction of associational demand-making and the projects of state and party actors
will create such spaces and how associations can use them as sites of representation or interest intermediation.
NOTES
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
In the Latin American context, the word popular has a decided class connotation. Hence
the use of the adjective in the terms popular interest regime, popular associations, and
popular sector here specifically refers to the lower classes.
It might be noted that a similar shift in interest regime has not occurred in the polities of
Europe in the same way. As Crouch indicates (Chapter 2, this volume), unions have been
challenged but have maintained a more central position and greater strength, even as they
take on a different set of issues.
Examples of popular associations are neighbourhood associations, communal kitchens,
rotating credit associations, NGOs providing social services to popularsector constituencies or organizational support to other associations, organizations of street vendors, and
many others. The universe of associations under consideration is thus diverse, but does not
extend here to associations geared towards the public interest at large rather than the popular sector in particular (Peruzzotti and Smulovitz 2000).
Scaling refers to either the vertical formation of superordinate structures or the horizontal
coordination of activities.
Another type of transition through regime collapse or breakdown had different characteristics, but elite-dominated transitions received particular analytic attention in the Latin
American cases. See Huntington (1991, pp. 113114 fn.) for a discussion of typologies and
146
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.

a scoring that characterized only one Latin American country as a collapse (but see R.B.
Collier [1999, pp. 119ff.] for a different scoring of this case).
This analysis follows R.B. Collier (1999).
Using data that pre-dates the 2001 crisis, Portes and Hoffman (2003, p. 55) show Argentina
as an exception.
In Chile, the 1990s saw some recovery from an earlier steep decline. These figures are taken
from a database compiled by Kenneth Roberts, who used data from the ILO and other
sources.
This distinction has not been drawn in much of the literature on collective action. For
instance, while Offe and Wiesenthal discuss both the formation and growth of individual
unions, they do not distinguish the latter from the problem of coordination and scaling
among unions.
In highlighting the union-association contrast, the present analysis overlooks substantial
variation within each category. The greater homogeneity of interests of some workers and
its facilitation of union formation, such as those in isolated enclaves (as in mining), has been
a well-recognized example.
See Roberts (1998) and Goldfrank (2002) on the failed cases of Chile and Peru and the more
successful cases of Uruguay and especially Brazil, which has been particularly successful in
designing local institutions of participatory budgeting that have substantially redirected local
spending priorities towards popular neighbourhoods.
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6. Making capitalism compatible with

democracy: tentative reflections from
the East
Lszl Bruszt
INTRODUCTION
Making democracy compatible with capitalism is not the same as making
capitalism compatible with democracy. The former is about extending citizenship rights in capitalist economies that are already established; the latter is
about first creating the basic parameters of democratic politics and extending
property rights afterwards. Examples of the first process were the (re)democratizations in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s; examples of the second
were the institutional transformations in the former state socialist countries.
The two processes differed in their starting points and their initial dynamics;
they converged however at a later stage and, in both cases, the variety of
outcomes was the same: a certain form of autocratic capitalism, a combination
of oligarchic democracy and an under-regulated market economy or, finally,
the coming about of a certain degree of co-habitation between liberal democracy and a regulated market economy.
As to this last outcome the coming about of compatibility between
democracy and capitalism one can find two diametrically opposing positions in the literature. According to one approach, dominant till the 1980s and
revived in the 1990s, broad socio-economic changes allow the two to become
compatible with each other. According to the other, conflicts and compromises between broad-based political forces make the two compatible. Politics
is absent from the first approach that attaches a primary role to general socioeconomic change or development. According to this strand in the literature,
compatibility is about the coming about of the right patterns of interests,
norms and behavioural patterns that are required for the coexistence of the
two institutional domains. Social, economic (and related cultural) developments bring about the conditions for the emergence of these proper interests, norms and behavioural patterns (for an excellent survey of this literature,
see Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens 1992, ch. 2). What exactly these
149
150
conditions are can be deduced from the experience of the most developed
countries that are pictured in this strand of the literature as the endpoints in the
development of the two institutional domains.
Political factors are at the centre of the second approach that was developed
as the criticism of the previous approach and was based on the analysis of
political change in Southern Europe and Latin America. In this approach, most
forcefully expressed in the work of ODonnell and Schmitter, compatibility is
one of the possible outcomes of conflicts and compromises between broadbased political forces struggling for the preservation or the alteration of the
political, and with it, the social and economic status quo (ODonnell and
Schmitter 1986, pp. 6667). Development, social, economic or cultural, in this
approach instead of being a precondition for democratization is one of the
potential outcomes of political change. If successful, the process of making the
two institutional domains compatible involves complex exchanges among
contending forces. These constitute interacting coordination games taking
place in parallel within several domains: uncertain coalitions shaped by a
rapidly changing balance of forces (1986, pp. 6667; Karl 1987, 1990). The
possible outcomes of attempts to change the rules of the political game are
shaped primarily by rapidly changing balance of political forces not predetermined by pre-existing conditions.
Several different outcomes are possible in that underdetermined process of
regime transformation. Purposive political action as much as unexpected events
and unintended consequences of previous decisions shape the balance of forces
between contending actors, and with that, the possible outcomes. In Latin
America, authoritarian reversal, some limited extension of citizenship rights and
a democratic regime highly constrained in altering economic institutions were
the outcomes in countries where the dynamics of the changing balance of forces
gave status-quo-preserving coalitions the upper hand in dictating the rules of the
game. Revolutionary transformation of the basic parameters of the economy
and the polity was the outcome where radical challengers to the status quo could
unilaterally impose the new rules. The dynamics of conflict most conducive to
making the two domains compatible was the one in which there was stalemate,
that is, an uncertain and relatively even balance of forces between contending
camps, not allowing any of the sides to impose the new rules and define the new
roles unilaterally (ODonnell and Schmitter 1986, pp. 5965). It was this situation that forced actors to search for accommodation among diverse interests, to
reach complex compromises sometimes instituted in the form of foundational
pacts and to seek for solutions that could make institutional change in the two
domains compatible, if not complementary, with each other (1986, pp. 6667;
see also the insightful analyses of Karl 1987, 1990).
In this chapter, I will explore the use of the two approaches for the analysis of the post-communist developments. I start with a modified version of the
Making capitalism compatible with democracy
151
old preconditions literature as it was applied to the post-communist cases. The

representatives of the Eastern variant of the precondition literature claimed
that the newly democratizing countries, due to the backwardness of their social
and economic structures have to face a forced choice between continued
democratization and capitalist transformation. According to the pessimistic
variant of this approach, in the absence of a highly stratified market society,
the post-socialist condition, democracy and capitalist transformation are
incompatible with each other (for a discussion and critique of this approach,
see Stark and Bruszt 1998). Absent such a society with its correct distribution of preferences, democratization would only allow for politicizing the
process of economic transformation and the predicted outcome would be the
blocking of economic change. According to the optimistic and activist variant
of the same approach, there was a way out of this impasse. Economic transformations could and should be depoliticized via shock treatment and rapid
economic change would subsequently bring about a stratified market society
with the right distribution of preferences and make capitalism compatible
with democracy.
As will be discussed below in detail, the outcome of interacting change in
the two institutional domains in post-communist Eastern Europe was exactly
the opposite of what was predicted or prescribed by the revived preconditions
literature. In all the post-communist countries where decision-making on
economic transformation happened primarily outside the framework of democratic politics, the outcome was some form of corrupted market and the degeneration of the democratic polity. The simultaneous consolidation of democratic
institutions and the emergence of a regulated market economy occurred in
those countries where institutional transformation in the economic domain
was simultaneously politicized within the framework of emerging democratic
institutions. These outcomes of the parallel changes in the fields of polity and
economy are in line with the central claim of ODonnell and Schmitter that
compatibility is not the outcome of an apolitical process of development but,
to the contrary, it is the outcome of successful politicization of development.
How and to what degree economic change could become subject to democratic political contestation and compromise was directly related to the
outcomes of the respective regime transitions. In the countries where the transition produced a polity in which the political authority to make binding decisions was concentrated and the former elite could impose institutional change
in the economic domain, uncontested by newly emerging social and political
forces, the outcome was oligarchic democracy combined with a corrupted
market. In countries where broad-based political mobilization brought about
the transformation of political institutions and the political authority to make
binding decisions was broadly distributed, the balance of forces after the initiation of economic transformation remained relatively even. This prevented
152
either incumbents or any other economic or political actor from imposing the
new rules of the game unilaterally and forced them to search for accommodation and coordination among diverse interests.
The second part of the paper will be devoted to conceptual exercises with
the goal of making changes in the institutional domains of polity and economy
in the East more comparable with those in the South. Both the starting points
and the initial dynamics of these changes differed in the two regions. A
conceptual frame is needed that allows for the simultaneous discussion of
interacting change in the two domains. As a basis for this, I will use the
conceptualization of economic transformation implicit in the work of
ODonnell and Schmitter as changes in the rules of the game in the economy
that define the scope of economic freedoms and determine the distribution of
economic wealth and opportunities. Transitions away from diverse types of
autocratic capitalism in the South were about attempts to repoliticize
economic freedoms and, therefore, to make the rules that determine the distribution of economic wealth and opportunities subject to democratic political
contestation and compromise. Synchronizing institutional changes in the two
domains involved extending citizenship rights in such a way that those who
were threatened by the transformation of the rules governing the economy
would not use their de facto powers to halt the de jure transformation in the
institutions of the polity. This process resulted in the parallel upholding of citizenship rights and property rights in those countries where the dynamics in the
changes of the political balance of forces were conducive to make actors capable of negotiating complex exchanges across the two institutional domains.
In the East, as will be discussed below, during the first phase of the transition away from autocratic state socialism, the ruling elite had lower incentives
and fewer opportunities to fight against the extension of citizenship rights. The
challenge of finding accommodation between property rights and citizenship
rights was absent. A large part of the former autocratic elite expected to win
extended economic freedoms from the extension of citizenship rights. There
was no need to negotiate complex exchanges between the two domains and
therefore the dynamics of institutional change in that phase differed between
the two regions. The East met the South only when the rapid economic liberalization and privatization introduced after the founding elections resulted in a
dramatic increase in the concentration of economic wealth and power in the
hands of the new elite. Economic regulation and, in general, the making of the
rules that defined the parameters of the emerging capitalist order and the distribution of wealth and opportunities started after liberalization and privatization. It was in this later phase that the rules became subject to political
struggle. As in the South, the stakes were not only the rules of the economy,
but also the way decisions were made about these rules. To put it differently,
in the East it was only after the founding elections that the form and the
153
substance of economic issues became the object of political controversy. In

this struggle between diverse interests, some of the actors tried to extend the
scope of democratic decision-making to cover economic matters, while others
sought to depoliticize these rules and to neutralize the freedom of contending
political forces.
I shall argue that, despite their different starting points and different initial
dynamics, the Southern and the post-communist experiences were variations
on a common theme: how to govern exchanges between the two institutional
domains in such a way as to make the emerging rules in both domains compatible with each other. The logic at work behind the diverse outcomes was the
same in the East as the one described and analysed by ODonnell and
Schmitter in the Southern European and Latin American cases. Parallel establishment of citizenship rights and property rights was the outcome where
actors acted under conditions that forced them to search for solutions via
cross-sectoral coalitions and compatibility between conflicting interests.
THE PRECONDITIONS LITERATURE AND EASTERN

DIVERSITY
The question about the compatibility of democracy and capitalism, once fashionable in the literature on Latin America, came in a somewhat modified form
to the East. Until the 1980s the dominant view in Latin America was that broad
structural (economic, social, cultural) changes were preconditions for this
compatibility. Once these missing preconditions were present, democracy
would become compatible with capitalism. The underlying assumption of the
preconditions literature was that the less developed countries of the South
would converge towards the model of the most advanced societies of the
North-West. They would go through the same stages of development and
imitate the same sequences in order to arrive at the end of the history with
the same outcome.1 The main lesson of the North-Western path was assumed
to be universal and clear: development first, democracy later. Once reaching
similar economic conditions they would achieve the same political outcome
albeit with some delay. Or, to put it in a more positive way, development
makes democracy compatible with capitalism.
In the East, the issue of the compatibility of democracy and capitalism
arrived only at the end of the wave of democratization that began in 1989, but
came immediately in two different versions. The pessimistic one was similar
in its conclusion to the one sketched above although it differed somewhat in
its argument. In the highly egalitarian post-communist societies, ran the argument, the parallel transformation of political and economic institutions was
impossible. Because of their flat and inarticulate social structure, the economic
154
transformation would create too many losers and too rapid an increase in
inequalities. The losers would not tolerate these changes and would use their
newly acquired political rights to stop the process also jeopardizing the
potential transformation via populism. Absent a stratified market society with
a large enough number of potential winners and a functioning capitalism that
could bring about this society, democracy and capitalism were regarded as
logically incompatible. [Capitalist] development first, [liberal] democracy
later was the implicit slogan of this argument. (For a critique of this approach,
see Stark and Bruszt 1998.) The optimistic and, for that matter, more activist
version of the thesis that large scale socio-economic change would eventually
bring about the preconditions for the compatibility of democracy and capitalism came from Western advisers linked to the International Monetary Fund
(IMF). Get politics out of the way, put in place the missing elements by fast
privatization and liberalization and the ensuing economic growth will make
democratization possible (for a critique of this approach, see Stiglitz (1999)
and Roland (2000)). The stress was on the speed of the introduction of these
policies by shock treatment insulated from democratic politics. Resolute political elites, depolitization of economic transformation, no experimentation with
unorthodox policies this was the mix that would get the missing structural
elements in place and eventually make capitalism compatible with democracy.
Both the Southern and the Eastern versions of the compatibility thesis
proved to be wrong. In the South, during the wave of democratization of the
1980s, enduring democracies were created under initial conditions dramatically different from the ones demanded by the preconditions literature. In the
East, the interaction and sequencing between democratization and economic
transformation was exactly the opposite of what was predicted or prescribed.
One can discern three broad patterns of change in the East in the institutional domains of polity and economy, and each resulted in different outcomes.
Some countries experimented heavily with a broad politicization of institutional change, exploring and exploiting a diversity of organizational forms to
interweave diverse principles of aggregation and coordination of heterogeneous interests. Here the outcome was what could be called compatibility of
democracy and capitalism (Stark and Bruszt 1998; McDermott 2002;
Orenstein 2001).
In these countries, now new member countries of the European Union, one
can speak about the co-evolution of capitalism and democracy; in a second
group of post-communist countries, one would be more accurate to refer to the
co-decomposition of capitalism and democracy. The transformation of
economic institutions in these countries came closer to the depoliticization
model promoted by the neo-liberal experts. More precisely, it was in these
countries that decision-making on the transformation of economic institutions
took place largely outside the framework of democratic institutions. Strong
155
executives insulated from mechanisms of accountability introduced sweeping

economic reforms primarily by way of executive decrees. But while they were
free to act unconstrained by other democratic institutions and, therefore, did
not have to coordinate among heterogeneous interests, they were also unable
to build the political coalitions needed for the enduring support of reforms and
were easy prey for capture by powerful territorial and economic groups. Large
oligarchic groups dominated economics and politics in these countries,
corrupting both markets and democracies (Hellman 1998; Stiglitz 1999;
Bruszt 2002). Russia and Ukraine were the most characteristic representatives
of this group, which consisted of most of the post-soviet republics except the
three Baltic countries.
Finally, in a third group of countries, institutional changes in the two
domains went in cycles of stop and go, depending on the outcomes of competitive elections. In a polarized political field with unstable coalitions of political and economic elites competing for power, the over-politicization of all
aspects of the transformation did not allow for institutional experimentation
with coordination of diverse interests. While the minimal level of electoral
democracy was maintained and the elementary parameters of a market economy were gradually put in place, changes in each of the two institutional
domains several times weakened institutional development in the other. In
these cases, instead of co-evolution or co-decomposition, one could speak of
a tense coexistence between capitalism and democracy. Bulgaria and
Romania were the best examples of this group of countries.
In the first group of countries the combination of liberal democracy and
regulated market economy was the outcome of a continuous process of interaction between the two institutional domains. As a rule, policies and laws are
contested and forged within a broader range of partial regimes representing
diverse interests and combining different decision-making rules. In this case,
institutions rapidly consolidated (see Schneider and Schmitter (2004) and
Schneider (2004) for a cross-regional comparison of this issue). By the second
half of the 1990s these countries were able to introduce an extensive and more
or less effective set of economic regulations. Economic activity evolves within
the framework of encompassing social regulations embodying in an always
temporary and contestable fashion the accommodation of diverse interests and
evaluative principles. It is only in these countries that one can speak of a
compatibility of the two institutional domains. Gradually, increasing societal
coalitions were formed and powerful actors in one domain had few incentives
and/or capacity to challenge the basic institutional parameters of the other one.
In the countries representing the second pattern, major policies and laws
were made primarily outside the formal institutional framework of democratic
institutions and tended to reflect the outcomes of informal bargaining between
incumbents and diverse territorial and economic groups.2 Democratic rights of
156
the citizens were limited as these polities sank below the minimal level of electoral democracy. Economic activity evolved in the framework of particularistic regulations reflecting the interests of the most powerful. This pattern,
however, did not result in a stable equilibrium. In Russia, for example, the
oligarchic coalition between state actors and diverse territorial and economic
oligarchies was severely weakened by economic crises, and the unfolding
conflicts within the coalition led to a strengthening of the authoritarian
features of the regime. In Ukraine, on the other hand, a split in the oligarchic
alliance, coupled with the broad political mobilization of civil society and
extensive political support from the West, resulted in redemocratization.
Chronic instability of institutional arrangements was the outcome of interactions between the two institutional domains in the third group of countries.
Incumbents in these countries did their best as a rule to weaken institutions
that could make them accountable both within and outside of the state. Policies
and laws were contested and often revoked by the opposition after changes in
government. Economic regulations were weakly and selectively enforced and
their durability was dependent on the outcome of the next election. While the
recurring political and economic crises did not challenge the basic parameters
of any of the two institutional domains, neither did they lead to institutional
stabilization.3
These divergent outcomes of interaction between economic and political
change have clearly contradicted the predictions and prescriptions of the
revived preconditions literature. According to the proponents of that approach,
the creation of a functioning market economy was the precondition for
upholding citizenship rights and property rights. They also maintained that
economic transformation could only be successful if unhampered by democratic politics. In realty, the creation of a functioning market economy was the
outcome of the simultaneous extension and upholding of citizenship and property rights. Those countries could navigate to this outcome where the citizenship principle of equal treatment in matters affecting collective choices, as
expressed by ODonnell and Schmitter, were less constrained and the remaking of their economic institutions was subject to continuous democratic political contestation (1982, p. 11).4 In the countries where the making of the new
rules of the economy were most effectively depoliticized, the outcome was
either a limited democracy or the re-establishment of autocratic rule, as well
as the enrichment of the few at the price of the impoverishment of the many
(Hellman 1998; Stiglitz 1999).5
The logic at work behind these diverging outcomes of the attempts to make
capitalism compatible with democracy were, moreover, roughly the same as
the ones described by ODonnell and Schmitter (1986) based on their study of
the attempts to make democracy compatible with capitalism in the South.
Parallel upholding of citizenship rights and property rights was the outcome in
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those countries where none of the contending actors could impose the new
rules of the game and the dynamics of the changing balance of forces made
actors search for compatibility among diverse interests in both institutional
domains. In the countries where the former autocratic elite could impose institutional change in the economic domain uncontested by newly emerging
social and political forces, the outcome was oligarchic democracy combined
with a corrupted market. In those where broad-based political mobilization
brought about the transformation of political institutions political power was
more distributed and the balance of forces after the commencement of
economic transformation remained relatively even, preventing either incumbents or any other economic or political actor from imposing the new rules of
the game unilaterally. As in the Southern European and Latin American cases
analysed by ODonnell and Schmitter, it was in these countries where actors
with contending visions of economic institutions were forced to search for
accommodation among diverse interests, to negotiate complex compromises
and to seek for solutions that could make institutional change in the two
domains compatible, if not complementary, with each other.
In the East, where the basic rules of binding decision-making were put in
place prior to the starting of the economic transformation, the new political
institutions imposed additional constraints on the contending actors. In the
countries where the mobilization and self-organization of diverse types of
social actors brought about the change in the political regime, authority was
institutionalized and distributed in a way that limited the chances of unilateral
rule making. This prevented incumbents from serving solely some groups of
private economic interests and forced them to search for accommodation
among the diversity of private economic interests (Bruszt 2002; GryzmalaBusse and Luong 2002).
DEFINING SOME CONCEPTS (AND EXPOSING SOME

ASSUMPTIONS)
While the democratization framework of ODonnell and Schmitter travelled
well to the East, to make the Southern and Eastern cases more comparable
one has to make explicit the assumptions about the transformation of
economic institutions and the resulting different kinds of capitalisms. This is
needed to allow interacting change in the two domains to be discussed in a
common frame. In their original work ODonnell and Schmitter identified
diverse patterns of political change away from authoritarian rule in more or
less well established capitalist economies. Since all of their cases were
diverse types of capitalism, they focused on conceptualizing the political
aspects of the regime change, primarily the interaction between (political)
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liberalization and democratization. In their treatment of these dimensions one

can also identify a definition of economic transformation (albeit implicit) as
the altering of the rules that determine the scope of economic freedoms and the
distribution of wealth and opportunities. As the basis for the conceptual exercise that follows, I will use and expand upon this scheme. I shall start by
making explicit some assumptions about transition as the interaction of change
in the two institutional domains. Then, I will discuss separately these two
domains: economic transformation and political democratization. In the
discussion of the latter, I will primarily rely on the formulations of ODonnell
and Schmitter. Finally, I shall bring together these two processes of change by
identifying typical pathways away from autocratic capitalisms and autocratic
state socialisms. It is not my goal here to compare cases or to analyse factors
of divergence among them. My goal is more modest: to contribute to the
creation of a conceptual property space within which specific cases can be
better compared and their diversity better explained.
Transitions
The present volume deals with transitions from certain authoritarian regimes
towards an uncertain something else this is the opening sentence of the
Tentative conclusions about uncertain democracies by ODonnell and
Schmitter. I could hardly imagine a simpler and better starting sentence for a
book that discusses processes of change in a non-teleological way by stressing
the non-linear and underdetermined nature of these changes. In this chapter I
also speak about transition in this sense, as the interval between one combination of a political regime and economic order and an uncertain other combination. The common starting point is an autocratic political system either with
a more or less established capitalist economic order or with a state socialist
one.6 In the case of the political regime, the uncertain something else might
be the installation of some type of liberal democracy, the return to some type
of authoritarian rule or the emergence of a revolutionary alternative to both. In
the case of the economic regime, this uncertain something else might be
capitalism with a redefined structure of public regulation and social distribution, the emergence of a private ordering, by which a coalition of private
firms and persons in control of the state sets the rules of the economy, or some
type of state socialism. There is no necessary double transition: the outcome
could be that only the political regime changes and what is altered in the economy is in the nature of the system of defences around the basic parameters of
the structure of pre-existing rules. The opposite can happen too: the political
regime can remain intact and the economic order can be completely transformed although, for that path to be taken, the only known alternative is the
transition from autocratic state socialism to autocratic capitalism.
159
The most important characteristic of the political transition, as ODonnell

and Schmitter have stressed, is that during it the rules of the political game are
in constant flux and arduously contested. Actors from different domains struggle not only to satisfy their immediate interests and/or the interests of those
whom they purport to represent but also to define rules and procedures whose
configuration will determine likely winners and losers in the future
(ODonnell and Schmitter 1986, p. 6). From the viewpoint of the economic
domain, the emerging rules of the political game will largely define who will
be permitted to participate with what resources in determining the rules of the
economy. The changing structure of political rules will largely define what
scope of economic issues will become subject to politicization, which actors,
public and/or private, will have a say in defining the rules of the economy and,
in general, what range of interests will have a chance of being taken into
account in that domain.
Besides the potential redefinition of the form and the content of direct state
redistribution, the most important stake during the economic transition
involves the redefinition of the rules that determine the scope of economic
freedoms and, with them, the redefinition of the rights and obligations of
different categories of propertied and non-propertied actors. The emerging
rules will largely determine who, with what resources and what sort of
enforceable rules, can become a player in the economic field and, as a consequence, what will be the likely change in the distribution of wealth and opportunities in the given economy.
If autocratic capitalism is the starting point, except in revolutionary transformations, the basic parameters of the economy are not challenged during the
transition. What is usually at stake is the social and economic role of the state
exercised through direct redistribution and through the definition of the public
rules of the economy. This later implies the defining of the structure of public
constraints on private economic freedoms and, in general, the scope and type
of economic activities from which firms and persons can profit. Demands are
made for imposing specific constraints on the freedom of property and extending rights for weaker categories of property holders, workers, consumers or
other categories of stakeholders. Altering the rules and scope of direct state
intervention in the economy or altering their characteristics may be another
important dimension to the economic transition. Either way, both (re)regulation and altering patterns of social intervention or subsidization will have a
direct effect on (emerging) classes, sectors and group interests and will have
an indirect effect on influencing perceptions of what interests and frameworks
of value will be recognized and rewarded.
Where state socialism is the point of departure, the extension of property
rights protected against arbitrary government interference and the struggle
over imposing public constraints upon these rights will be simultaneously on
160
the agenda of the economic transition. In principle, both citizens and their
leaders could contest the dismantling of public ownership, either in the name
of some type of democratic socialism or some revived form of paternalistic
state socialism. However, in all the known cases where social mobilization has
brought about political regime change away from state socialism, resistance to
the extension of private property rights has been marginal. This is to say that
the stakes of economic transition in most of the Eastern countries have been
similar to the ones described above. As in the non-revolutionary Southern
cases, actors in most of the Eastern countries have had to redirect their attention primarily to the public rules of the private economy.
Political Liberalization and Democratization
In defining political liberalization and democratization, I rely primarily on the
original definitions of ODonnell and Schmitter. Liberalization refers to guarantees of individual and group freedoms as they affect political action, and
democratization refers to the altering of the structure of authority in order to
make rulers accountable to citizenry. Political liberalization more specifially
means
making effective certain rights that protect both individuals and social groups from
arbitrary or illegal acts committed by the state or third parties. On the level of individuals, these guarantees include the classical elements of the liberal tradition:
habeas corpus; sanctity of private home and correspondence; the right to be
defended in a fair trial according to pre-established laws; freedom of movement,
speech; and so forth. On the level of groups, these rights cover such things as freedom from punishment for expressions of collective dissent from government policy,
freedom from censorship of the means of communication, and freedom to associate
voluntarily with other citizens. (1986, p. 7)
While the range of these rights can be expanded and there is no scholarly
consensus on their exact range, the point is that the concept of political liberalization refers to a range of rights that are preconditions for individual and/or
collective political action protecting citizens from arbitrary intervention
(Schneider and Schmitter 2004). Democratization concerns the extension of
the citizenship principle, that is, the right
to be treated by fellow human beings as equal with respect to the making of collective choices and the obligation of those implementing such choices to be equally
accountable and accessible to all members of the polity. Inversely, this obligation
imposes obligations on the ruled, that is, to respect the legitimacy of choices made
by deliberation among equals, and rights on rulers, that is, to act with authority (and
to apply coercion when necessary) to promote the effectiveness of such choices, and
to protect the polity from threats to its persistence. (ODonnell and Schmitter 1986,
pp. 78)
161
While the focus of their work is on the formation of political democracy,

that is, the extension and application of the citizenship principle to public institutions and governmental processes, ODonnell and Schmitter discuss separately the possibilities of extension of the citizenship principle in two other
directions. The first, labelled social democracy is about extending the citizenship principle to cover private social institutions, such as workplaces,
schools, universities, political parties, and so on. The second, labelled welfare
democracy and at times associated with economic democracy, is about
extending formal equality of citizenship rights to the attainment of substantive
equality of benefits and entitlements, such as wealth, income, education, housing, information or autonomy, respect and self-development (ODonnell and
Schmitter 1986, p. 12).
Political liberalization and democratization do not necessarily go hand in
hand. Liberalization may or may not be followed by democratization. One or
the other of these two processes can become stuck during transition or can even
reverse itself after temporarily converging with the other. A relatively stable
mix of political liberalization and democratization is what ODonnell and
Schmitter called political democracy or, using the term of Robert Dahl,
polyarchy. Transition can, however, become stuck somewhere between the
autocratic status quo and polyarchy. The transition to political democracy can
be reversed and the outcome may be some type of hybrid regime. One of these
stalemated outcomes could be a limited political democracy, also called illiberal democracy what they call democradura. The institutions for holding
rulers accountable are present, but the political freedoms of individuals or
groups are restricted and/or are not enforced. Another of these hybrid outcomes
they call liberalized autocracy or a dictablanda. It emerges when some of the
guaranteed political freedoms are extended but the mechanisms that could
make rulers accountable to the citizenry are not put in place or are abolished.
The coexistence of the electoral franchise and the right of citizens to act
equally and collectively to contest the actions of the rulers constitutes political democracy or poliarchy. It can be sustained and institutionalized in several
diverse forms. The emergence of what Robert Dahl has called the procedural
minimum for the exercise of these rights of participation and contestation
(secret balloting, universal adult suffrage, regular elections, partisan competition, associational freedom, executive accountability) may or may not go hand
in hand with the emergence of reliably known, regularly practiced and voluntarily accepted rules for structuring political representation, resolving
conflicts and arriving at binding decisions. This is a historically contingent
settlement called institutionalized or consolidated democracy (Schneider and
Schmitter 2004, pp. 712).
There are a variety of rules for structuring representation and decisionmaking, each distributing differently the chances that categories of diverse
162
societal actors will be able to participate effectively in making binding decisions. In a non-institutionalized democracy the rules of representation and
decision-making are unstable, contingent, contested and, therefore, prone to
short-term alterations in the balance of political forces. Mechanisms that
would force incumbents to accommodate and include societal diversity in the
making of binding decisions and to stay within the boundaries of respecting
the citizenship principle or the rule of law are weak or absent (ODonnell
1993; Schneider and Schmitter 2004; Bruszt 2002). Democracies might get
stuck de facto in such a low equilibrium, without necessarily reverting to the
de jure removal of some or all citizenship rights. Depending on the dynamics
of the changing balance of political forces, these polities might stabilize into
some form of hybrid regime, or they may eventually move towards some form
of institutionalized democracy. The latter is a complex and perhaps neverending process of arriving at a contingent consent to structuring political
representation and accountability in a way that allows for the coordination
(some might say balancing) of multiple domains and their diverse interests and
considerations.
Economic Liberalization and Public Regulation
From the viewpoint of rights, economic transition implies two, analytically
separable, processes: (i) the eventual extension of the scope of protected
economic freedoms and (ii) the (re)making of the public rules of the economy,
the latter referring to the (re)definition of the structure of rights and obligations that put binding constraints on economic freedoms. The first process I
label economic liberalization and the second I call public regulation.
Economic Liberalization
The extension of protected property rights means making effective rights that
allow private actors to profit safely from rational calculative enterprise while
being protected against arbitrary or illegal acts committed by the state or third
parties. The most important of these guarantees are related to property rights,
as well as the freedom of contracting. Protection from arbitrary or illegal acts
implies the presence of a state that can wield enough power to maintain the rule
of law and uphold economic freedoms with effective and credible capacity to
honour these rights within its own actions. If such a state is present, and can
maintain a predictable policy environment, then private economic actors can
safely transact with each other without the fear of being deprived of their property either by economic predators or by way of arbitrary state intervention.
These freedoms in former state socialist economies might start with some
informal acceptance of the right to produce and buy elementary types of
163
consumer goods and services in a second economy without any guaranteed

rights. Such informally tolerated commodification of consumer goods and
services can result in the emergence of local markets (Nee 1989; Szelenyi and
Kostello 1996). The most important characteristics of these submerged
markets are that actors have strictly limited rights to own, buy or sell labour or
capital goods. They have to rely primarily on informal mechanisms of enforcement and are exposed to a highly unpredictable policy environment. In these
cases, one can talk about the emergence of a socialist mixed economy when
the state extends some enforceable legal guarantees, including the buying and
selling of labour and capital goods, and even encourages private economic
activities even though the public economy remains dominant (Manchin and
Szelenyi 1987; Szelenyi and Kostello 1996). In their last years, managers in
Poland, Hungary or some parts of the former Soviet Union were able to
acquire some de facto property rights over the public firms they directed. In
the absence of enforced property rights, however, they had low incentives to
enter into rational calculative enterprise and had a high incentive to engage in
asset stripping and hiding their gains. In China and Vietnam, under the conditions of unchanged autocratic political regimes, economic actors acquired de
jure property rights in dominant sectors of the economy that extended to
labour and capital markets. In these cases we can say that the economy transited to capitalism while under continuous one-party rule.
Large-scale privatization of the public enterprises together with liberalization of prices and trade after the fall of state socialist regimes per se did not
result in the extension of property rights in the sense the term is used here. In
several post-communist countries, states did not have the capacity to uphold
economic rights, enforce obligations and maintain a predictable policy environment. Economic actors had to rely primarily on barter as the dominant form
of economic transactions or on diverse forms of private law enforcement without stable guarantees that they could safely profit from rational calculative
enterprise. If some de facto extensions of property rights herald the beginning
of economic liberalization, the process of economic liberalization is over when
a public power is in place with the capacity to uphold these economic rights
and obligations.
Public Regulation
The guiding principle of economic regulation is the protection or promotion of
some notion of public interest. It involves both the right of the public to define
under what conditions private choices in the economy will further public interests and the obligation of private decision-makers to take these restrictions
into account. Regulatory institutions frame private economic action by imposing the framework within which economic actors base their calculations. They
164
define a range of diverse interests and values that economic actors have to take
into account when making their calculations. They bring together heterogeneous interests, define the boundaries between diverse institutional fields and
sectors, establish mandatory rules about which combinations of interests and
values should count within a given domain of economic action, and establish
what general value frameworks should or could be applied to economic transactions.
Making the rules of the economy public implies coordinating (some might
say balancing) diverse interests and considerations and establishing binding
relations of varied temporality between them. The mere imposition of rules
that reflect the interests of the most powerful economic actors is not regulation
in the sense the term is used here. One can speak about the emergence of a
regulative state when it becomes the stable self-interest of the incumbents to
coordinate diverse interests and values while setting the rules of economic
actions. A regulative state in this sense can exist in both autocratic and democratic political regimes.7
Both guaranteed property rights and public regulation of the economy are
constituted with reference to some explicit conception of the public interest.8
How these public interests are defined and what structure of rights and obligations will serve them is continuously contested. Their definition by a specific
regulatory institution may have very limited temporal validity. A given specification of public interest may be replaced by another one that redefines what
interests should be given priority and what association between diversity of
interests and values will further a different conceptualization of public interests. Changes in the overall structure of economic rights and obligations are
usually much slower. If they have been imposed by repression, they are likely
to change under conditions of a dramatic shift in the balance of political
forces. In democratic settings, this structure is more likely to reflect historically contingent compromises based on some hegemonic idea concerning the
right or fair alignment of diverse group interests and social functions. These
hegemonic concepts serve as master frames or selective criteria that set the
boundaries for deciding on specific regulations and they may be more resistant to short-term changes in the societal balance of forces.
Changes in the structure of the public rules of the economy can go hand in
hand with changes in the form of regulation. Until the 1980s, nationalization
of specific enterprises was extensively used as a form of public regulation in
Western Europe, alongside statutory rules. These capitalist mixed economies
have transited since the late 1980s towards the dominance of statutory regulation that had been the primary model of regulations in the USA since the late
nineteenth century.
No single set of specific rights and obligations exclusively defines the
public accountability of private economic activity. This is a historically
165
contingent matter, although there have been some regionally specific models
and, at global level, one can see the emergence of a regulative minimum. The
new Eastern member states of the European Union had to incorporate around
80,000 pages of regulations into their legal systems in order to demonstrate
their readiness to participate in the European market-making regime. At the
global level, there is a continuous struggle to counterbalance supranational
regulation that gives priority to the liberties of selected categories of propertied groups against labour market or capital market norms that would defend
the interests of non-propertied groups, ecological values or local cultural
heritage. Rival calls for depoliticization of economic issues usually entail
demands for public sanctioning of private orderings and self-regulation by the
most powerful economic actors. In extreme cases, highly exclusionary repressive regimes can maintain exclusively private orderings, which means the
setting of binding rules by exclusionary alliances of the most powerful
economic actors.
All in all, public regulation refers to processes of making or transforming
the rules of the economy resulting in the (re)definition of the structure of rights
and obligations of the different categories of propertied and non-propertied
actors. These processes might involve the replacing of private self-regulation
with public rules where there were none before; putting private self-regulation
under public regulative frameworks; and/or making state regulation public
where exclusionary private groups dominated rule-making by the state before.
The emerging rules will largely define who, with what resources and what sort
of enforceable rights can become a player in the economic field and, as a
consequence, what will be the likely change in the distribution of wealth and
opportunities in a given country.
Democratizations East and South: Making the Rules of the Private
Economy Public
Except in the case of revolution, the challenge of transitions both in the East
and the South was to coordinate citizenship rights and property rights. That is,
it was to synchronize the relations of accountability at the level of public institutions with the relations of accountability in the private institutions of the
economy. Coordination between these two types of rights is a non-trivial
undertaking. If the citizenship principle of equal treatment in matters affecting collective choices knows no intrinsic boundaries, as ODonnell and
Schmitter have put it, then the same holds for the principle of private property
when it encroaches on natural rights in the public domain. Synchronization
involved extending rights in one domain in such a way that actors in the other
domain would not use their power to halt the change.
One of the possible outcomes of the interacting changes in the two domains
166
is that actors will settle upon a mutually satisfactory solution allowing for the
parallel upholding of citizenship rights and property rights. This implies agreement on the range of economic issues that can be politicized and the types of
interests and values that can be publicly sanctioned in the private economy.
Additionally or alternatively, it might imply agreement about institutionalizing
the accountability of public institutions and rulers in such a way that the public
accountability of private businesses is kept within acceptable boundaries.
Such a compromise is historically contingent and never definitive. Its content
might dramatically differ from country to country depending on variation in
social, political and economic starting conditions, the organizational capacities
of contending forces or the intervention of external actors and factors that
influence the balance of domestic forces (see Figure 6.1). At one extreme, the
outcome might be a settlement in which only the exercise of citizenship rights
is constrained and the public accountability of the private economy remains
minimal or unchanged. The political regime changes but what is altered in the
economy is only the nature of defences around the pre-existing basic rules.
The institutional faade of political democracy is there, with regular, more or
less free and fair, elections but there is very limited room to politicize
economic issues and the state sanctions rights and obligations that reflect the
Substantive
benefits and
entitlements
Welfare
capitalism
Regulated
market
Liberal
Social
democracy
and regulated Democracy
capitalism
Liberal
autocratic
capitalism
Illiberal
democracy
Oligarchic
democracy and
unregulated
market
Autocratic
Economic
liberalization capitalism
Socialist
mixed
economy
Autocratic
Marketization state
socialism
Democratization
Liberalized
state
socialism
Poliarchy
Political
liberalization
NonInstituinstitutionalized tionalized
democracy
democracy
Social and
economic
institutions
Figure 6.1 Transitions: democratization and economic transformation
167
interests of the most powerful economic actors.9 This combination of

polyarchy and unregulated (or, more precisely, privately regulated) economy
is what we call oligarchic democracy. This is usually an unstable equilibrium
and, depending on the dynamics of the balance of forces, the demand to extend
the citizenship principle to the level of the rules of the private economy might
lead to two different outcomes.
One of these is the piecemeal extension of the citizenship principle and,
with it, the gradual emergence of the public regulation of the economy more
often than not through the institutionalization of mechanisms of political
representation and decision-making that allow for the inclusion of some
formerly excluded interests. The other possible outcome might involve depriving some or all of the irresponsibly behaving civic groups and parties of their
citizenship rights. Illiberal democracy (limited democracy) is the outcome
when the procedural minimum of elections is maintained but restrictions are
put on the freedoms of particular individuals or groups who are deemed insufficiently prepared or sufficiently dangerous to enjoy full citizenship status
(ODonnell and Schmitter 1986, p. 9). Liberal authoritarian capitalism is the
outcome when only some of the guaranteed political rights remain. We can
talk about (a return to) autocratic capitalism when even these rights are taken
away.
These processes can also move in the opposite direction. Autocratic capitalist regimes, under actual or perceived pressure from below and fearful of a
social explosion might resort to extensive public regulation in the economy
(Evans 1995; Doner, Bryan and Slater 2005) Besides trying to coordinate
diverse interests, authoritarian leaders may also experiment with some political liberalization, a process that can lead to the full extension of citizenship
rights, depending on the constraining factors and the right combination of virtu
and fortuna.
The logic and the dynamics of the first phase of democratization have
differed in the South and the East. In the former, the extension of citizenship
rights took place in the presence of entrenched property rights with varying
degrees of public regulation of the economy and usually in the presence of
strong, well-organized coalitions with high incentives and capacities for
defending the existing distribution of economic rights and obligations. The
bourgeoisie (and its allies) saw the first attempts to change these rules as an
encroachment upon their natural rights and basic freedoms. Only major
changes in the political balance of forces could alter this perception
(ODonnell and Schmitter 1986; Streeck 2004).
From the viewpoint of institutional change, it makes a great difference
whether the status quo ante is some form of regulated capitalism in which the
interests of some disenfranchised groups counted, or a repressive oligarchy that
completely excluded these groups. Severe frictions and potentially explosive
168
tensions were more likely in the latter case and some version of oligarchic
democracy was the more likely outcome. The propertied class had lesser
incentives and opportunities to obstruct changes when regulated autocratic
capitalism was the status quo and the state had some relative autonomy from
the economic elite.
When autocratic state socialism without any guaranteed property rights was
the starting point, the ruling elite had less incentives opportunities to fight
against the extension of citizenship rights. The most important difference
between the ruling classes of the two kinds of autocratic orders was in the
forms of capital they possessed. While the ruling class of the autocratic capitalist order had its capital primarily in physical or financial wealth and had
much to loose from the extension of citizenship rights, the primary forms of
capital that the state socialist elite enjoyed were social connections and
cultural capital (Eyal, Szelnyi and Townsley 2000). Both of these forms of
capital were useful assets for the ruling elite to improve its position while
extending the property rights. A significant part of the former elite could
expect to win extended economic freedoms from the extension of citizenship
rights. Members of the intertwined political and economic elite could lose
these forms of capital only under conditions of an incomplete extension of citizenship rights.
As there was no need to negotiate complex cross-sectoral exchanges, most
of the pacts during the phase of political transformation in the East were
survivability pacts (Karl 1990). These dealt primarily with legal continuity,
allowing the members of the ruling elite to become legitimate (political and
economic) players in the new regime, and with rules that could improve their
chance of obtaining advantageous political positions in the new political
regimes.10
In all the democratizing countries in the East, economic liberalization
resulted in a rapid increase in the concentration of economic power in the
hands of an old-new elite. This dramatically altered the societal balance of
forces. Once the new rules of the economy started to be chosen, the early
winners of the economic transformation did their best to preserve their initial
gains and prevent economic rule-making from becoming subject to democratic political contestation (Hellman 1998; Stiglitz 1999; Bruszt 2002). The East
met the South at this point, just after the initiation of economic privatization
and liberalization. In those countries where the socio-economic elite remained
an autonomous political force without any major counterbalancing power
within the state or the society, oligarchic democracy was the unstable outcome
of the attempts to introduce public regulation over the emerging private economy. Institutional change progressed in uncertain ups and downs in those
countries where political change was initially imposed from above, but after
the first founding elections the opposition could consolidate its power and
169
mobilize broader societal coalitions. Those countries moved towards illiberal

democracy or some form of autocratic capitalism where the newly emerging
democratic opposition was weak or divided and could not mobilize broader
social coalitions against the oligarchic alliance controlling the state.
Synchronizing institutional change in the two domains was only possible
where the mobilization of a broad societal coalition brought about political
change, where the non-propertied groups had some organizational power and
where the distribution of political authority did not allow incumbents to rule
unconstrained.
CONCLUSIONS
In the comparative literature on democratization it has been commonplace to
contrast the Eastern transitions with the Southern ones based on differences in
transitional agendas, that is, the issues and challenges that actors had to face
simultaneously (Bunce 2000; McFaul 2002; Offe 1991; Stark and Bruszt
1988). Having the redefining and remaking of states, nations, property and
politics on the transitional agenda at the same time, the Eastern transitions
were characterized as overloaded, in contrast to the simple Southern
processes of democratization. Above I have argued that, in terms of the key
issue of coordinating citizenship and property rights, the difference between
the two regions was more in the sequencing of the challenge than in the kind
of challenge. The point of this chapter, however, is not that the Eastern cases
were not so special and that the Southern cases were not so simple. Rather I
have argued that studies of democratization that focus solely on its political
aspects without including interacting change across institutional domains
are likely to miss the complexities that are at stake when property rights and
citizenship rights have to be made compatible with each other. It is in this
issue, I have tried to demonstrate, where one can identify the most important
and still unexplored contribution of the work by ODonnell and Schmitter on
the question of the relationship between democracy and development. Far
from coming about automatically as a result of development, the coming about
of the conditions of the sustained cohabitation of capitalism and democracy is
the result of political struggle with its outcomes not predetermined by preexisting conditions.
More research is still needed to answer such questions as what were the
factors that helped to sustain and enlarge cross-sectoral coalitions, how will
the rapid transnationalization of economies and states or the differences in the
patterns of transnationalizing these two regions effect the historically contingent settlements that have brought about the cohabitation of citizenship rights
and property rights in both sets of countries. One of the lessons one can draw
170
from the Eastern cases is that the emergence of a regulated market economy
with a relatively more equitable distribution of wealth and opportunities was
the outcome of the evolution of specific types of democracies that had the
capacity to organize and coordinate diversity.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The author would like to thank Sabina Avdagic, Colin Crouch, Terry Karl and
Philippe C. Schmitter for their insightful comments on the earlier version of
this chapter.
NOTES
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
See ODonnell and Schmitter (1986) and Schmitter and Karl (1992) for the critique of this
approach. As Wolfgang Streeck has pointed out (see his chapter in this book), the critique of
this approach in its different versions has always been more or less present in Schmitters
work.
On the discussion of this phenomenon from a cross-regional perspective, see the pioneering
work of ODonnell (1992, 1993)
The more recent promise of future EU membership seems to be altering the balance of political forces in these countries and it seems to be moving these countries in the direction of an
uncertain, but more stable, form of capitalist democracy.
In the literature on post-communist diversity there is general agreement that structural
factors have no or only weak explanatory power in clarifying differences in the processes
and the outcomes of institutional change. Supporting indirectly the claim of ODonnell and
Schmitter that what matters are the specifics of the politicization of institutional change,
primarily diverse political factors are used in this literature to account for diversity, such as
the distribution of political power, the characteristics of the party systems, the outcomes of
the founding elections or the level of political polarization (Bunce 2000; Frye 2002;
Hellman 1998; Grzymala-Busse and Luong 2002; Fish 1998).
In the Central European countries where governments were exposed to extended accountability during the period of economic transformation and were prevented from unilaterally
imposing the new economic institutions, the percentage change in the Gini coefficient (a
standard measure of inequality) was relatively low. The same coefficient was almost 100 per
cent between 1988 and 1994 in Russia, where the major rules were introduced by presidential decree (EBRD 1999; Hellman 1998).
For a definition and an encompassing discussion of autocratic state socialism, see the work
of Janos Kornai (Kornai 1992)
On the conditions of the emergence of regulative states in authoritarian regimes, see Doner,
Bryan and Slater, 2005
Opponents of regulation like to see both economic transactions and the coming about of
social order as self-constituting that should be prevented from public interference. The idea
that private choices do not necessarily serve public interests and might even undermine
market order and competition can already be found in the work of Adam Smith, who saw
the danger in the self-regulations of people in the same trade and, among others, forcefully
argued against the publication of a registry of business people, claiming that it might encourage the combination of businesses in the same trade to conspire against free competition.
In my reading, some of the pacts in Latin America analysed by Terry Karl (1987, 1990) had
an outcome that came close to this definition.

10.
171
In the two most often cited pacted cases of transitions in the East, Poland and Hungary, there
were encompassing exchanges between the rulers and the contenders but their results did not
last long. In Hungary, the political pact was challenged at the moment of its signing by some
members of the opposition and its results were overruled by a referendum two months after
the signing of the pact. In Poland the pact was more encompassing, including basically two
separate pacts: one political, the other socio-economic. The political pact lasted less than a
year and the first non-communist government overruled most of the results of the socioeconomic pact.
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PART III
Democracy and European integration
7. The problem of legitimacy in the

European polity: is democratization the
answer?
Claus Offe and Ulrich K. Preuss
IS THERE A LEGITIMACY DEFICIT IN THE
EURO-POLITY?
No Problem, No Solution
Even though complaints and uncertainties about the democratic deficit of the
EU are as widely shared as the perceived need to think about institutional solutions which would remedy this condition, agreement on the actual presence of
such a deficit is by no means universal. Before we address the nature of and
possible solution to the problem, therefore, we need to deal briefly with views
that deny either the existence of the problem or at least the availability of a
solution.
Three such views can be identified. First, there is the technocratic view.
This rightly claims that only the political choice between alternative courses
of action advocated by different elite segments and mass constituencies qualifies as the substance of politics and hence needs to be made within a framework of rights, values and democratic procedural rules. If, however, the
agenda of European elites consists of matters that cannot be reasonably
debated, but must be competently deduced from some compelling technical
calculus, then making choices through democratic procedures is bound to
diminish the efficiency of decision-making and the quality of the decisions.
These are better left to experts, professionals, epistemic communities and
bureaucrats with their specialized knowledge in order to maximize ideological
neutrality. The more reliably such technical decisions are insulated from politics and general legitimation demands, the more effective and efficient the
process will be in which some one best way will eventually be determined.
As the purpose that rules are supposed to achieve is clear and unambiguous,
namely Pareto optimality in the Single Market, the regulatory regime serving
that purpose is entirely for the experts to determine. They have their tested
175
176
methods of dealing with the three familiar types of public-choice problems

and market failures. These are: (i) negative externalities (that is, economic
actors securing advantages at the expense of third parties); (ii) the inverse case
of the provision of public goods (that is, economic actors having to be
adequately rewarded for providing benefits to some collectivity, for otherwise
they would not provide them); and (iii) common pool problems (that is,
economic actors having to be prevented from inflicting damage upon their
future selves through the unwise overutilization of scarce resources, such as
fish or the environment). This view of the EU as a technocratic regulatory state
is often associated with the work of Majone (1997). In order for an efficient
regulatory regime to be available, decisions must be kept strictly out of the
politicized circuits of democratic representation and accountability.
Second, there is the democratic saturation view which, in contrast to the
technocratic view, does not deny the need for democratic legitimation of the
European policy process but rather claims that the democratic requirements of
accountability and representation are already sufficiently fulfilled in the
current institutional set-up of the EU. From a normative point of view it may
be asked why there should be a need for distinct mechanisms of legitimation
for EU policies since the member states, first, have voluntarily acceded to the
EU, based upon democratic procedures according to their respective constitutional rules, and, second, are fully represented in the institutions which draft
and implement EU policies. In other words, there is a solid and continuous
chain of legitimation from the individual citizens in the member states up to
the institutions of the EU. After all, the members of the Council are members
of democratically elected governments of member states, and Commission
members are nominated by their governments and have to withstand the
scrutiny of the EP, the directly elected European legislature. So democracy is
in place, people do not generally complain about its absence, and concerns
about a deficit are unwarranted. The author with whose writings these views
are often associated (as found in Follesdal and Hix 2005) is Moravcsik (1998).
Third, there is the unfeasibility/undesirability argument. This argument
comes in one of two versions. As far as the feasibility of a stronger democratic legitimation at the EU level is concerned, it invokes the seemingly obvious
absence of a European demos. The citizenries of member states are simply
too different (by size, by historical experience, by religion, by language, by
level of economic development, and so on) to be able to form a minimally
coherent political community with which even losers in elections would identify. The presence of a durable self-identified and robust political community,
as opposed to a multinational population, is an essential precondition for any
form of democracy. Turned on its normative side and regarding the issue of
desirability, the argument is that democratic legitimation procedures at the
European level would inevitably lead to a deepening of European involvement
The problem of legitimacy in the European polity
177
in matters which properly belong to member states and thus would interfere
with the desire of the latter to maintain and increase national autonomy. Czech
president Vclav Klaus (2005) is a prominent proponent of this view. The
implication is that there is no democratic deficit because something that
cannot or should not be changed cannot meaningfully be called a deficit.
Why There is a Problem, and Not Just for the EU
So the very existence of the problem we are going to discuss in this chapter
needs first to be established. In establishing it, we rely, among other things, on
arguments advanced by Follesdal and Hix (2005), Beetham and Lord (1998),
and Weiler, Haltern and Mayer (1995). Two points seem important. First, the
lack of democratic accountability at the European level penetrates into the
domestic arena and affects the quality and credibility of the practice of
national democracy. Thus the problem is not primarily that the EU must
become democratic; it is that member states must remain democratic. Second,
major institutional actors at the EU level (the ECB, the ECJ and the
Commission when operating as a rule enforcement agency) have a direct
impact upon the citizens of member states and therefore must be subjected to
an institutionalized legitimacy test.
As to the first of these points, Schmitter has argued that the democratic
deficit does not just exist at the EU level of the policy process but, partly as a
consequence of this, at the member state level as well. [T]he shift of functions
to and the increase in the supranational authority of the EU have been
contributing to the decline in the legitimacy of domestic democracy
(2000a, p. 116). National parliaments are losing control, the making of collectively binding decisions is being denationalized and executive actors can
effectively ignore their parliaments when making decisions in Brussels
(Follesdal and Hix 2005, p. 5). To a large extent this can be attributed to the
fact that national governments, in particular parliaments, are no longer in the
position to control the basic parameters of their national economies. The intensity of institutional interdependence between the national and the European
levels of governance is bound to thwart all attempts to isolate the two levels
and to protect the national political system from the effects of democratic deficiencies at the European polity. Thus there is in fact reason for concern that, if
the shift of political power from the democratically legitimized national
governments to the EU is not accompanied by some kind of compensation
through additional channels of supranational legitimation, democracy within
nation states will decay.
While this is clearly not the place to engage in a lengthy elaboration of the
meaning of democracy, it still seems worthwhile to highlight one aspect of
what we take to be one of its essential ingredients. A democracy is a system of
178
political rule, with a basic division between rulers and ruled. There are two
characteristics of how rulers are institutionally positioned in a democracy, one
passive and one active. As to the passive mode, rulers and their activity of
ruling are subject to the scrutiny and evaluation of voters, the media, organized
interests, and so on, by whom they are held accountable. As a consequence,
democratic rulers are defined by the institutionalized possibility that they may
lose their office. Yet in order for a system of rule to qualify as a democracy,
there is also an active aspect to the practice of ruling: rulers need not only find
support; they must be willing and able, both de lege and de facto, to transform
this support into policies, thus determining, at least to some significant extent,
the conditions and developments of the political community on behalf of
which rulers rule.
This active characteristic of democratic rule is less often focused upon by
democratic theorists than the passive one. To reverse this imbalance, we
might say: a democratic system of rule is one in which rulers are actually able
to make a difference in terms of the public goods and protection they provide
through the making of public policy. A system of rule in which rulers are held
perfectly accountable by the ruled yet cannot accomplish anything is as much
a caricature, or an impoverished version, of democracy as a system of rule that
is highly effective in shaping conditions and developments without being
accountable to the ruled. Moreover, the two aspects of democratic rule hang
together, as it appears unlikely that the ruled will have good reason to support
a set of rulers whose capacity for significant policy-making and problem-solving has evidently evaporated.
The ruled are powerless when the institutional resources to control rulers
are absent. But the rulers themselves can also be powerless, and thus do not
qualify according to our second criterion of what a democracy is, when they
find themselves incapable of dealing effectively with problems of providing
public goods or of protecting society from public bads. When this is the case,
the system of rule loses its policy-making capacity, and democratically constituted political power is idled. Rulers can be deprived and dispossessed of (all
or significant parts of) their policy-making capacity by, for instance, military
threats. In modern capitalist societies, however, the major cause of incapacitation of rulers is of an economic nature. Markets hold would-be policy-makers
to ransom: as soon as they adopt an activist approach to the solution of social
problems through policy-making, they may be punished by the adverse reactions of economic actors, such as investors or employers, on whose activities
policy-makers depend for their tax base as well as their political support. The
present configuration of the Euro-polity and its negative integration is clearly
such that it enables economic actors to make extensive use of this mechanism
of punishment and thus to disable the making of public policies.
It follows from this brief conceptual exploration that the democratization of
179
the Euro-polity would hinge on two conditions: not just on the institutionalization of mechanisms by which ruling elites are made accountable and
responsive to the ruled, but also on the enhancement of the rulers capacity for
action, that is their capacity to withstand and constrain the exercise of
economic power if and whenever such power stands in the way of the making
and implementing of public policy. This latter condition applies to the EU
level of rule as much as it does to the policy-making capacity of the governments of member states a capacity that has been vastly decimated at the
member state level by the process of EU integration, without being resurrected
at the EU level itself.
As to our second point, the widely shared belief is that there is a growing
imbalance between what the EU can do to European citizens and the role the
preferences of European citizens are permitted to play in the EU. To be sure,
European citizens can register their preferences in European elections. Yet the
political resources of the EP remain limited in relation to what it can do in
terms of both the selection of Commission members and the substantive
legislative proposals of the Commission. European elections reveal even more
of the malaise that is familiar from national elections, some of the symptoms
of which are low turnout, decline in voters party identification, and a very
widespread ignorance about what European legislation involves and what the
alternatives are. The low turnout in the EP elections is not necessarily a sign
of citizens indifference towards the EU but may rather be an expression of
feelings of frustration and perceived powerlessness, which at some point
might also undermine the trust in the regular working of national democratic
institutions. In addition, as a consequence of voters cognitive, as well as affective, distance from the issues and agendas before the EP, European elections
are perceived to be somehow less important electoral contests within member
state arenas, a misperception that is also suggested by the fact that the parties
competing for votes are the national parties, according to the electoral law
under which EP elections are held. Voters in Euro-elections are simply not
offered an opportunity to choose between rival partisan elites presenting alternative programmes at that level of aggregation (Schmitter 2000b, p. 230;
emphasis added). For what is at issue in European elections is hardly what
European leaders have done in the past or promise to do in the future. It is
rather an expression of support or disapproval aimed at national parties and
governments. To be sure, members of the main legislative body of the EU, the
Council, obtain their mandate as the result of a democratic process. But this
mandate, again, is typically both sought and won in terms of an executive role
at the national level, not a legislative role at the European level. This is almost
inevitable, since the Councils negotiations take place behind closed doors,
typically concern policy packages and involve mechanisms such as log-rolling
and variable coalition-building that remain highly opaque to the national
180
public. Rule-making within the EU is based upon highly secretive and technically obscure decision-making practices (Schmitter 2000b, p. 227). The
result is an extremely thin kind of accountability, leading to the condition that
the EU adopts policies that are not supported by a majority of citizens in
many or even most member states (Follesdal and Hix 2005, p. 6). Moreover,
the main actors in the field of European economic and monetary policy (the
Commission, the ECJ and the ECB) remain to a large extent unaccountable1
to any representative body, pursue policies that privilege market-making
negative integration, and are informed by a neo-liberal regulatory framework and a monetarist framework for EMU. As a result, these policies are
consistently to the right of the policy preferences of the median European
voter. As the Commission, in its role as agenda setter and rule enforcer, is
unaccountable to both the Council and the EP, it is all the more open to pressures and influences from organized interests that are present in Brussels.
If actors involuntarily suffer losses or disadvantages inflicted by other
specifiable actors (rather than anonymous market forces), and if the infliction
of such losses is not stipulated by national law (such as tax law or civil law),
then such losses require justification and, failing that, compensation. While it
doubtlessly provides for gains and opportunities, the EU routinely inflicts such
losses. First, and due to the principle of the direct effect of EU law on member
states, citizens have to comply with or are exposed to the effects of European
rules even if they have not been decided upon unanimously, but by qualified
majority decision in the Council. These can be described as political losses,
sometimes dramatized as bordering on foreign rule. Second, the EU rules
and orders which the citizens of member states have to comply with, beginning with the four market freedoms, have virtually always, and in spite of the
pretension of a distributionally neutral enhancement of technical efficiency
(Pareto optimality), (re)distributive side effects, which benefit some category of economic actors and hurt others. These are equivalent to losses of
economic opportunity. Third, as EU-level actors impose constraints and conditions which limit the policy-making capacity of member states in such crucial
policy areas as fiscal, monetary and competition policy, states and their democratically accountable governments suffer losses in terms of their political
autonomy losses which can be perceived by national constituencies as plain
cases of uncompensated political expropriation. These three types of losses
can be sufficiently severe to require justification.
Standard Justifications and their Weaknesses
The two standard justifications that Europe offers its member states and citizens are: (i) the backward-looking justification that member states have, after
all, voluntarily given up some of their sovereignty at the point of joining the
181
Union; and (ii) the forward-looking, or functionalist, justification in terms of

output legitimacy.The latter is claimed on the grounds that general observance of European constraints and universal compliance with European regulations will eventually turn out to be for the better, in terms of prosperity,
equitable burden-sharing and security from negative externalities, for all sides
involved. Losses, Europeans are assured, are of a transitory nature, and corresponding gains of a long-term nature. However, because of the long time that
has elapsed since the EU-6 member states originally decided to form the
Community, and because of the fact that the Union was a fait accompli to the
new members of EU-25 when they joined in 2004, justification (i) appears
weak. So does justification (ii) in view of the debatable question of whether
the promises and hopes for universal gains in prosperity have actually realized
or, for that matter, will be redeemed at some (indeterminate) point in the
future. It is in view of these two weaknesses that it seems desirable that, in
addition to the backward-looking and the forward-looking justification, a third
more presentist justification mechanism should be developed.
It also seems consistent to argue that the more harm and loss an institutional
actor is capable of inflicting, the more strictly it should be supervised and held
accountable. As Scharpf (2004) has pointed out, the institutional structure of
the European policy process consists of two constituent arenas. On the one
hand, we find the arena of institutional actors (Commission, ECJ, ECB), who
control highly concentrated power resources with a major impact upon
European member states and citizens; yet these actors and the ways their
resources are employed are not accountable to anybody. On the other hand,
there is the arena of the Commission in its agenda-setting role, of the Council
and of the EP; this is a set of institutions in which power is extremely
dispersed and the number of veto points is arguably greater than it is within
any national democracy. Given the highly consensual and consociational
nature of this latter arena, it seems effectively prevented from doing much
harm. Taken together, the proportionality rule stated in the first sentence of this
paragraph is stood on its head: the more power, the less accountability, and
vice versa.
As far as the second arena (Commission as agenda setter, Council, EP) is
concerned, one of the most striking differences between the domestic democracies at the member state level and the EU polity is that the latter does not
have an institutionalized opposition. One might say that, lacking hierarchical
enforcement capacities and taxing powers of its own, the EU cannot afford an
opposition, as the policy process is utterly dependent upon consensus and is
extremely vulnerable to non-cooperative moves on the part of member state
governments. As a consequence, legislative outcomes emerge from bargaining
behind closed doors in the Council and are adopted under decision rules based
on either unanimity or oversized majority. In its legislative activities, the EU
182
rules by elite consensus and compromise, and it cannot rule where these are
not forthcoming. This style of ruling without an opposition is what is meant by
governance a concept whose rise to amazing popularity in academia and
beyond is itself symptomatic of the scarcity of power resources that are both
legitimate and effective. Governance means coping with conflicts and policy
problems through negotiation, compromise, deliberation, voluntary cooperation, and non-coercive (soft) modes of persuasion and policy coordination.
The Commissions White Paper on European Governance (European
Commission 2001) urges the use of non-legislative instruments, co-regulatory mechanisms such as the open method of coordination, involving civil
society and strengthening a culture of consultation and dialogue. Good
governance can thus be described as an activity that tries to create and maintain order in a complex world of highly interdependent elements with a blurred
line between state and non-state (that is, economic and civil society) as well
as national and supranational actors, and with multiple veto points and a
severe scarcity of sovereign power resources. In this world, the activity of
ruling loses much of its vertical dimension of bindingness and giving
orders; it transforms itself into horizontal acts of winning support through
partnership and a highly inclusive participation of all pluralist collective actors
to the extent that they muster any capacities at all for vetoing or obstructing
policy results or for contributing to desired outcomes.
Both of these institutional subsets, however, share the feature of deficient
accountability. They lack what we have termed presentist legitimacy. In spite
of the normative appeal of some of the catchwords (such as openness,
participation, accountability) employed in the document on European
governance, we must note that the type of governance the document outlines
is an elite-sponsored executive strategy to win support and cooperation in a
supranational context. This strategy is driven by the necessities of scarce political resources rather than by normative principles, and it is advertised, with an
evident technocratic ambition, as good governance rather than normatively
right governance, which would be based upon and answerable to the preferences of European citizens. The legislative process is all-inclusive and nonpartisan rather than based upon a set of (essentially contested) political values
and programmatic priorities. The European style of governance is strongly
non-adversarial and consociational, often slow, erratic and opaque as to who
is responsible for which policy, its conceivable alternatives and the outcome
of its implementation. Lacking an opposition and, as a consequence, an ongoing contest between governing and opposition forces, European governance at
the elite level and beyond is deprived of the creative learning pressure that
democratic political competition can instil.
Instead of a political opposition, it is individual countries or groups of
countries that are perceived to act as contestants in European policy debates
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within the Council. But member states and coalitions of member states are not
equivalent to an opposition proper. Citizens have no choice between being,
say, Spanish or Irish, while they do have a choice between supporting, say,
social democratic or market-liberal policy proposals, provided such a choice
were offered to them. The absence of an equivalent to an opposition (or a
counter-elite to the governing elite, preparing for taking office after the next
elections) has, we argue, three implications, all of which are relevant for issues
of legitimacy:
First, a regime of European governance that has no opposition does not
allow for institutionalized dissent. It thus tends to leave dissenters with the
only option of populist, nationalist, xenophobic and protectionist anti-EU
mobilization. Such of fundamental opposition movements, located partly on
the political left but mostly on the right, have been gaining momentum in
virtually all member states and even have achieved a not insignificant minority of seats in the EP itself. The elite consensus reached in the Council and the
Commission remains vulnerable, and increasingly so, to what Beetham and
Lord (1998, p. 14) refer to as direct popular counter-mobilization.
Second, the highly consensual and opaque style of legislation within the
Council, as well as the uncontested agenda-setting role of the Commission,
leave most European citizens in a state of semi-illiteracy concerning European
matters and issues. As Follesdal and Hix (2005, p. 1317) convincingly argue,
the lack of knowledge and interest that citizens show in these affairs and
policy issues does not have to be genuine, but may well be an artefact of the
lack of public debate and controversy at the elite level. Voters form and, as it
were, discover their preferences endogenously in the policy process itself,
that is by following the contest between alternative policy packages and political programmes. Both the lack of such contests and the technical complexity
of many of the issues make it exceedingly difficult for citizens to gain and
apply what citizenship requires, namely an adequate understanding (Dahl) of
issues, agendas and their own rightly understood interests and preferences.
Perceiving very well that European legislation is in some way consequential
for them and their interests and values, but at the same time being deprived of
the wholesome learning opportunity that comes with the public debates on
democratic politics and the contest of clearly distinguishable parties and
programmes, citizens observe the EU policy process with a sense of apathetic
fatalism and sceptical non-involvement.
Third, the legitimacy of the domestic democratic policy process itself is
bound to suffer if the citizens of member states perceive that elected national
governments are embarrassed by having to submit to Brussels-based policy
decisions which contradict the expressed preferences and evident interests of
the member state government and its constituency. These citizens have reason
to feel politically dispossessed if national legislatures are being by-passed2 by
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the Council and the EP as institutions authorizing laws that apply to the
national citizenry. Inversely, and to mitigate voters frustration with this inconsistency, member state governments have strong incentives to delay and
obstruct unpopular Council decisions whenever national elections are forthcoming and the governing parties must fear losses due to the impact of EU
policies upon critical parts of the national electorate.
We conclude from this discussion, to repeat, that stronger and more
presentist forms of legitimating EU-level decisions and policies are called
for not just for the sake of building European democracy, but equally to
preserve the credibility of democratic arrangements within member states.
Technocratic, or what Beetham and Lord call performance-based, justifications are no longer good enough. For one thing, and as the European
Employment Strategy (as adopted by the Lisbon European Council in 2000
and significantly watered down in its ambitions by the Brussels European
Council of 2005) serves to demonstrate, indicators of actual performance are
not as compelling as they would have to be if the burden of justification of EU
policies were to be borne by them alone. For another, there is no such thing as
exclusively technical policy-making that follows a one best way charted by
experts or, for that matter, the ECB. Any presumably expert decision has
(re)distributive effects and can be politically challenged in terms of their fairness and appropriateness. Moreover, virtually all students of the politics of
European integration agree that the permissive consensus that used to generate passive and detached acceptance of EU decisions is wearing thin with the
European citizenry, and that the EU has turned from a generator into a net
consumer of generalized support.
Another reason that leads us to conclude that a more robust procedural
framework of legitimation is needed derives from the dual fact that: (i) the
redistributive impact of European policies is making itself felt ever more
acutely by citizens (an example being the Commissions abortive Services
Directive), and (ii) the tolerance for redistributive effects appears to decline
with enlargement. For as long as there is a sense of shared identity, solidarity
and familiarity with our neighbours (say, within the EU-6), we do not object
to them profiting from some redistributive effects. It is an entirely different
matter if beneficiaries can be framed as those other people or those poor
newcomers who gain (major, permanent and perhaps even seemingly undeserved) advantages at our expense.
A final reason that adds to the urgency of legitimation issues is the fact that
the EU is a moving object that is still in motion, and will remain in motion for
the foreseeable future, continuing to be involved in a dynamic process of
maturation, evolution and further expansion. These dynamics concern both the
(mutually conflicting) objectives of territorial expansion (widening) and of
the (re)allocation of policy competences within the Union (deepening). We
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further conclude that if legitimation of EU policies can neither derive from

unquestioning trust in the technical correctness of expert decisions (aptly
described as Pareto authoritarianism by Follesdal and Hix) nor develop
from the reliance on sentiments of widely shared sympathy, identity and solidarity with our fellow European neighbours, and if neither the chain of justification of domestic member state democracy that extends from national
elections to the Council and the Commission is strong enough nor oppositionfree consociationalist European governance is an adequate answer, then there
is ample reason to explore additional options for the legitimation of European
rule.
DEMOCRATIC LEGITIMACY IN THE ABSENCE OF A

DEMOS?
Legitimation is a set of procedural norms from the application of which legitimacy emerges. Legitimacy must first of all be distinguished from acceptance, as one is the opposite of the other. The latter terms comprises
favourable habitual attitudes, opinions, calculations of interests, and sentiments which, taken together, condition the empirical agreement of parts of a
population with political decisions and regimes. Legitimacy, in contrast, is the
effect of the compliance of actors with pre-established norms (Schmitter
2001, p. 2) that generate the rational motivation (which is open to argument
and insight) of all members of a political community, the demos, to comply
with acts of political rule, even if these acts (laws, executive and court decisions) are in conflict with the habits, opinions, sentiments and interests of
those who still comply. These pre-established norms generate motivational
force because they are believed to be intrinsically and demonstrably just and
valid. They stipulate the (limited) right of rulers to rule and the (equally
limited) obligation of the ruled to obey.
The source of validity of the constitutive norms can vary widely: it can be
divine revelation, national tradition, the universally shared belief in the exceptional qualities of a (charismatic) leader, or the belief that these norms, in
addition to being intrinsically valid, will also have desirable consequences
(such as domestic and international peace). As far as the EU and its member
states are concerned, this source of validity cannot be anything other than
democratic in nature, meaning, at a minimum, the equal political rights of citizens, the free exercise of these rights under a regime of civil liberties, and
procedures that hold rulers accountable for what they do while ruling. These
rights and obligations are always thought to be embedded in a constituted
political community whose members, due to the longitudinal stability of a
shared past and a hoped-for shared future, encounter each other with greater
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expectations of trust, reciprocity and solidarity than the expectations they have
of people who do not belong to that constituted community or demos.
The problem, however, is that the European political community for which
both the right of rulers to rule and the obligation of non-rulers to obey must
be designed is different from the demos as we know it from consolidated
national democracies. The notion of a national demos, because it invokes a
shared past and the commonality of a common future fate, provides a powerful and pervasive reminder of the collectivity in whose collective interest rule
must be conducted and in whose favour (namely that of our fellow citizens
and, as such, the democratic co-authors of the law) compliance is called for
(from all fellow citizens).3 There is clearly no equivalent of the national
demos at the transnational European level. Moreover, there is hardly a
prospect of the national populations of current and future EU member states
undergoing a fusion that will make them into a demos. Even if the Treaty on
the Constitution of Europe (TCE) had been adopted, the capacity of such a
unifying document to integrate its subject-citizens into something remotely
resembling a demos would remain in doubt (Grimm 2004).4 As a rule of
thumb, a durable and solidly self-recognizing political community that is, a
demos is created by constitutional design only under two rather exceptional
context conditions: either a historical rupture associated with a liberating
revolutionary experience (France, the USA) or a similarly deep discontinuity
after historical defeat and breakdown, with widely shared resolve to make a
new beginning (France, Germany, Italy after World War II). As neither of
these conditions applies to todays Europe, the energies of passion that are
released by the shared awareness of a dark past of dictatorical rule or a shining future of liberty are not generally available to drive the process of
European integration. Such passions may play a limited role in the Central
East European states that after 1989 escaped from the supranational regime of
authoritarian state socialism. Yet in spite of all the rhetoric of returning to
Europe, what these countries are eager to return to is the condition of their
own nationhood, with joining the EU being largely perceived as a tribute to
economic expediency, not to political aspiration.
If anything, the process of European integration, the substance of which has
largely been negative integration into the Single Market, has tended to
release considerable centrifugal in addition to integrative energies. While the
proverbial saying that good fences make good neighbours, if applied to
European state borders, has been at best of limited truth in the history of the
twentieth century, the opposite does make some sense in the recent experience
of the Single Market: the absence of fences may create tensions between
neighbours. While the small North West European economies (Ireland,
Denmark, Benelux) as well as the Baltic countries have every reason to appreciate the added opportunities that market integration has offered them, such is
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not necessarily the case with the large continental economies of France, Italy
and, in particular, Germany (with its persistent burden of integrating the new
Lnder and its liability of a still basically Bismarckian social security system).
In this latter group of countries, and given the new mobility in the context of
vastly diverging labour costs, there are increasingly vocal groups of integration losers (which come by country, by region, by sector of industry, by trade,
by occupation, by size of enterprise) who relate to their more fortunate foreign
neighbours with a sense of economic fear, intense rivalry, resentment, distrust
and jealousy. These sentiments are bound to lead to demands for better protection and more lenient constraints for us and fewer European subsidies for
them. It also leads to the spread of the strategic pattern of the competition
state that is constantly searching for ways to make conditions more attractive
to foreign and domestic investors by lowering taxes and the costs of employing labour relative to conditions that prevail in neighbouring countries.
The tensions that are generated by the Single Market do not just affect integration at the international (that is, European) level; they also impact on
national integration and the cohesion of national societies and economies.
Political parties and movements within the wealthier regions of member states
(in the South West of Germany, the North and East of Spain, the North of Italy,
the North of Belgium and elsewhere) have obvious interest-related reasons to
turn to their national governments, as well as to their regional constituencies,
with pleas backed by powerful regional interests to relieve them from the
burdens of interregional fiscal redistribution within their nation states, so that
they can compete more effectively within an environment of denationalized
markets.
Both European political elites and academic Europeanists have for a long
time been aware of Europes Achilles heel of lacking a demos that is remotely
equivalent in its internal coherence and its compliance-generating potential to
the various national demoi. Numerous efforts have been made by European
elites to alleviate this perceived defect, to build and promote through symbols
the awareness of a European identity, and to stimulate the publics imagination
of a Europe-wide political community. Eight types of approaches to strengthening an all-European sense of identity, belonging and common interest will
be briefly mentioned here.
First, many EU documents and legal texts try to provide assurances that
thinking of oneself as a European need not interfere with, let alone overrule,
narrower identities of a national or regional kind, as Europe is supposed to be
committed to the recognition of cultural (linguistic, religious, ethnic, historical) diversity and legitimate pluralism.
Second, there are philosophical and educational initiatives that probe into
the common heritage of traditions and values that may potentially overarch
diversity. These include Greek antiquity, Christianity and Judaism, the
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Enlightenment, and the lessons from the disasters of totalitarianisms and international warfare which marked Europes short twentieth century. These
references, together with the visionary assertion that European states and
peoples aspire to build a common future (TCE I1) and the reference to the
distinctiveness of European values and visions, may help establish an affective
dimension for European identification.
Third, a common European cultural space has been created to bridge cognitive distances between European citizens. It includes well-funded programmes
for transnational scientific collaboration and student exchange programmes,
including the emergence of a European scene in the high as well as popular
arts, entertainment and sports.
Fourth, there are the major economic programmes of structural, regional,
agricultural and cohesion subsidies designed to boost the competitiveness of
member states and regions and to facilitate the process of their upward harmonization.
Fifth, there is the legal framework of secondary European law with its
emphasis on creating a Europe-wide level playing field of fair competition,
through the protection of labour, consumers, and the environment that is made
binding on all producers or employers. For the euro zone, the EMU is the main
framework of denationalized monetary policy. Sixth, there is the promise of
prosperity through integration. The Treaty of Rome already lists among the
fundamental objectives of the European Community the constant improvement
of the living and working conditions of the European peoples. Seventh, there is
a dimension of integration that is abstractly referred to as the European social
model (ESM), comprising the combined objectives of prosperity, dialogue and
inclusion in matters of social policy. The latter, however, remains firmly under
the control of member states and has increasingly become a factor in member
states strategies to bolster national competitiveness. Eigthth and finally, we
come to the TCE, whose intended ratification by 2006 looks highly unlikely in
mid-2005. As commented upon above, the TCEs integrative potential is
limited, and its content undertakes to Europeanize democratic principles and
values, rather than creating new rights beyond what is presently constitutional
law within member states. It would serve, inter alia, to specify and expand the
stipulations of the Maastricht Treaty on the European Union (TEU Art. 1722)
concerning the rights attached to the status of European citizenship.
Let us briefly turn to an assessment of the empirical outcome of these various initiatives to integrate the populations of member states into something
that approximates an equivalent of a European citizenry or demos. In doing so,
we use the summary and analysis of Eurobarometer surveys provided by
Nissen (2004). When EU-15 citizens are asked whether or not they think EU
membership of their country is a good thing, the answers are roughly 50 per
cent Yes and 50 per cent No for 2003. This is the same distribution that was
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found in 1983, while in the early nineties it was 70 per cent Yes against 30
per cent No. Support for and identification with the EU can be either of an
affective or of an instrumental (or functional) kind. The latter is based on an
assessment of the perceived costs and benefits of membership whereas the
former values EU membership as part of ones own identity. As far as the
sense of European identity is concerned, one robust finding stands out: identification becomes stronger with the duration of membership, with the EU-6
countries leading the field. However, as far as utilitarian motivations
(membership is advantageous for the country) are concerned, it is equally
evident that much depends upon whether ones country is a net recipient of EU
funds or a net contributor to them. All the major net contributors (Germany,
Austria, Sweden, the UK) are to be found at the lower end of the scale of utilitarian supporters (close to or in the cases of Sweden and the UK, substantially
below 40 per cent), whereas all the cohesion countries (Greece, Ireland,
Portugal, Spain), with the substantial net benefits they are enjoying, turn out
to be utility enthusiasts with positive answers of above 60 per cent.
The policy implications of these findings are rather clear, as stated by
Nissen (2004, p. 29). First, the sustained efforts of the EU to cultivate a sense
of European identity by cultural, symbolic and educational strategies have not
been significantly successful. Countries still differ according to their identification with Europe, and the variable that explains these differences is duration
of membership, or habituation. Obviously European elites cannot administer
identity any more than anyone else. Second, utilitarian support for the EU is
fluctuating and is largely contingent on the perceived distributional impact of
EU policies and finances. As a rule of thumb, the EU has to buy support
through its allocation of costs and benefits, rather than being able to rely on
robustly entrenched normative orientations. What holds European citizens
together is the systemic integration of interests, interdependence and
exchange, and much less so and in markedly asymmetrical ways the social
integration of shared norms, identities and solidarities (Delhey 2004a). This
imbalance of the two kinds of integration is widely expected to increase in the
aftermath of the transition from EU-15 to EU-25.
What makes the incomplete and unsystematic list of the integration
approaches and initiatives so far undertaken in the EU interesting is what is
not included in it. First, Europe does not have a foreign policy capacity, the
ambitious proclamations of a Common Foreign and Security Policy and the
debates on a European security identity notwithstanding. As the war in
Kosovo of 1999 and the other post-Yugoslav conflicts have amply demonstrated, Europe has neither the military resources nor the resolve to conduct an
autonomous and coherent foreign and security campaign of its own. The EU
is often, in our view, wrongly credited (cf. Beetham and Lord 1998, p. 102)
with being an institutionalized guarantor of international peace between its
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member states. That peace is guaranteed in Europe is surely no small accomplishment, but it is an accomplishment not of the EU, but of NATO (under its
US leadership), to which the majority of member states belong. Also, a lacuna
in the security capacities of the EU is its failure to address open or latent separatist civil wars within member states (Northern Ireland and the Basque country respectively), as these are left to the exclusive authority of the latter. Any
attempt by the EU leadership to unify Europe by the conduct of an
autonomous foreign policy would immediately backfire by deepening the
divide between the old European West of the continent and much of the new
European East that was so effectively invoked by the US administration on
the eve of the American attack on Iraq.
Second, Europe does not have a consistent and reasonably promising policy
on employment and social security, in spite of the increasing ESM rhetoric and
the European Employment Strategy (EES) inaugurated at the Luxembourg
(1997) and Lisbon (2000) summits. While these problems are themselves
partly caused by the competitive conditions of the single market and negative
integration, the EU largely leaves it, in the name of subsidiarity, to member
state governments to cope with unemployment and social security finance.
The policy choices for dealing with these problems in effective ways,
however, are severely constrained by the monetary and fiscal regime governing the euro zone. To be sure, a rich variety of innovative and promising policy
proposals for coming to terms with ever more pressing problems of poverty,
exclusion and marginalization (proposals such as basic income schemes
designed to raise all European citizens beyond the poverty line by entitling
them to an unconditional and tax-financed minimum income, or Schmitters
proposal for a Euro-stipendium (2000a, pp. 4446)) have been advocated.
Yet it is in the nature of open economies that member states that adopt such
policy innovations unilaterally will immediately find themselves in the
sucker position, that is of an actor who provides uncompensated advantages
to others. Meanwhile the political costs of forming a policy consensus across
all or a significant number of member states appear prohibitive. If the EES, to
date hardly a success story, can be taken as an indicator, it signals the growing
awareness of European policy elites that issues of employment, social security
and poverty will either be resolved at the supranational European level and
by policies of positive integration that would have to trump or bypass existing subsidiarity reservations or they will not be resolved at all.
EUROPE UN OBJET POLITIQUE NON-IDENTIFI

What can these and similar efforts to integrate European societies transnationally and to create some approximate equivalent to the demos within the nation
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state conceivably result in? The answer cannot possibly be that the European
Union will assimilate itself to the familiar pattern of the European nation state
which, as we have argued before, is the necessary precondition for political
democracy and the legitimacy that flows from it. We know that the EU is a
non-state and non-nation (Abromeit 1998; Schmitter 2000a). This negative
classification does not tell us what kind of legitimation is both appropriate and
feasible for this fabulous entity which Jacques Delors allegedly once called un
objet politique non-identifi. In fact, its combination of territorial and functional elements is puzzling and defies unequivocal classification. As an ever
closer union among the peoples of Europe that develops a single institutional
framework which shall ensure the consistency and the continuity of its activities and that has established the status of citizenship for the nationals of its
member states, the EU is equipped with some of the basic features of a territorially defined polity. At the same time, the EU is hardly more than a bundle
of partial regimes with varying participants, such as the internal market
pursuant to Articles 3, 14 and 95 TEC, the currency union pursuant to Articles
105ff., or the common defence policy of those EU member states which are
also members of the WEU (Article 17 paragraph 2 TEU).
One of the most creative attempts at a classification of the institutional
particularities of the EU so far is Philippe Schmitters distinction between
stato/federatio, confederatio, condominio and consortio (1992, 1996). These
types represent different combinations of territorial and functional dimensions
of political entities. The condominio is the one which comes closest to the EU
in that it combines the same variants of functions and of territorial units. If we
try to translate Schmitters typology into the conceptual framework and the
terminology of state and constitutional theory, the stato/federatio is the federal
state (Bundesstaat), the confederatio is a confederation (Staatenbund),
arguably the consortio can be understood as a pattern of intensified intergovernmental cooperation (like the EUs common defence and security policy),
and a condominio is an entity which unites elements of a federal state
(Bundesstaat) and of a confederation (Staatenbund) without strictly conforming to either of them. According to the conventional legal distinction, federal
states are based upon a constitution and have a direct legal relationship to the
citizens of the federal units (states, cantons, provinces, Lnder). In contrast,
confederations come into being through the conclusion of international treaties,
and a legal relationship exists only between the federal entity and its member
states and does not extend to the citizens of the latters. The EU combines both
of these elements: it is based upon a multilateral international treaty (which
does not lose this character even if its most recent version [29 October 2004] is
to serve as a Constitutional Treaty after its hoped-for ratification in all of the
25 member states by November 2006). At the same time, because of the principle of direct effect as well as the institution of union citizenship, there is also
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a direct legal relationship between the EU and the citizens of the member
states. To underline the hybrid nature of this political entity, the German
Federal Constitutional Court has invented the untranslatable German term
Staatenverbund.5
Unfortunately, the new term does not necessarily help us to understand the
genuinely political character of the EU, nor does it provide us with a new
concept. Without a minimal degree of conceptual clarity about the EU, the
criteria by which we can determine the requirements for the legitimation of
this polity and its policies remain vague at best. In what follows we suggest an
understanding of the EU as a political entity for which a wide variety of names
would fit, ranging from union, federal union or confederacy through confederation, community and system of states to perpetual league, rpublique fderative and Bund (Forsyth 1981, p. 1). Whatever the appropriate term, what
constitutes the particular character of the EU is its origination in a treaty which
not only creates a distinct political entity the union or the Bund but which
at the same time transforms the political status of the parties to this treaty, the
member states. In the following we will elaborate on this.
There are three basic forms of relationship between sovereign states,
namely hegemony, balance of power, and those composite entities the potential terms for which we just mentioned and which we prefer to call union or,
in German, Bund (Forsyth 1981, p. 204). Unions originate from treaties
between sovereign states. In order to understand their particular character it is
helpful to distinguish between three general classes of contracts. When actors
have complementary interests and enter into a voluntary legal relationship
under which they exchange valued items (goods, services, ideas and so on)
this legal bond is what we call an exchange contract. When actors have identical interests and enter into a voluntary legal relationship, the contract which
they conclude is what we call a purposive contract (Zweckvertrag). Finally
there is a third kind of contract which is intended to transform, confirm or
nullify the status of at least one of the parties (one dramatic example being the
German Unity Contract, which stipulated that at the moment it became effective one of the two contracting parties, the GDR, would cease to exist). The
marriage contract between two people is typical of what some authors call a
status contract (Greber 2000, p. 175). For those familiar with Henry Sumner
Maines famous statement in his Ancient Law that the movement of the
progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract
(Maine 1986 [1864], p. 165, [emphasis in original]), the notion of a status
contract must appear oxymoronic. In fact, an act by which the existential
conditions of a person are changed is normally not an act of the same character as a contract affecting a thing which he or she can forfeit or contribute. A
status contract differs from the two other types of contract in that it is an existential contract in which a person with a particular identity enters into a new
193
legal relationship with another person or persons, for the purpose of changing
this identity in a new way. The ensuing union does not absorb the partners; but
it mutually obliges them in an ongoing relationship that is basically intended
to be indefinite. Note that this kind of contract is often the legal confirmation
of a pre-legal relationship, such as the relationship of love in the case of a
marriage contract. Such a pre-legal relationship consists in a relationship of
trust between the partners and requires diffuse mutual duties of loyalty and the
shared expectation of irreversibility.
The EU as a Republican Empire
Status contracts are also concluded between states,6 the relevant category for
our discussion being treaties that constitute a union (or a Bund) between them.
A union is different from a mere alliance between independent states that pool
certain resources but retain their independence and identity. What is required
for the creation of a union is the readiness of the parties to the status treaty to
enter into mutual ties of solidarity. Tocqueville, analysing the conditions of
durable confederations, emphasized a uniformity of interests and the same
stage of civilization, which almost always renders a union feasible
(Tocqueville 1835 [1990], ch. VIII, pp. 169f.). Similarly, John Stuart Mill
claimed that federal unions between foreigners are workable only if, among
other requirements, there is a sufficient amount of mutual sympathy among
the populations (Mill 1991 [1861], ch. XVII, p. 320). Others have referred to
this requirement as that of homogeneity (Schmitt 1965 [1928], pp. 375ff.;
Forsyth 1981, pp. 116, 207). But such similarity does not necessarily lead
states to enter into a union. Similarity is not even sufficient to hold an existing
union together. The dissolution of the union of Norway and Sweden in 1905 is
a striking example, the dissociation of Libya and Egypt in the seventies of the
past century another one. Even more unlikely is the formation of a union
between foreign nations. But it is precisely this that is constitutive of the EU.
We do not deny that the majority of the European nations which are members
of the EU share a cultural heritage (as based upon the cultural tradition of
Greek and Roman antiquity, the Christian-Jewish religious sources of their
culture, and the ideas of the Enlightenment). However, there are strong empirical indications that their populations perceive themselves mutually as foreigners, because they do not speak the same language, have different national
histories and myths, have developed different concepts for understanding their
political identity and, last but not least, harbour strong national prejudices,
sometimes even resentments, against each other.
It is against this historical background of perceived mutual foreignness that
the peculiarity of the EU must be assessed. Having been established for the
purpose of an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe (Article 1 para
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2 TEU), the European Union is the first by definition voluntary federation

in the history of mankind that recognizes the dissimilarity of its constituent
parties. The EU is a political body which is committed to respecting the
distinctive national identities of its member states and citizens, yet at the same
time subjects them in many significant areas to the jurisdiction of a common
government. In the history of political formations, most cases in which distinct
peoples have been subsumed under a common regime are those in which integration is accomplished through the hegemonic prevalence of an imperial
centre and the coercive power originating from that centre.
Due to their coercive mode of integration, empires can extend themselves,
depending upon the military resources at their disposal, over huge geographical areas. By doing so, they come to incorporate an increasing number and
variety of peoples, tribes and nationalities. In contrast, and up to the end of the
eighteenth century, republics polities based upon the voluntary participation
and the active involvement of their citizens in common affairs had existed
only at the local level of relatively small city states, and their citizenries were
usually highly homogeneous in terms of their origin, language, religion and
culture. Both the Federalists and Tocqueville observed that the federal system
of the USA had overcome the small-scale character of the traditional republic
and, for the first time in history, established a republic that resembled an
empire in its spatial extension. This became possible because what
Tocqueville speculated upon in his prophetic last two pages of the first volume
of Democracy in America did come to pass:
A time will come when one hundred fifty millions of men will be living in North
America, equal in condition, the progeny of one race, owing their origin to the same
cause, preserving the same civilization, the same language, the same religion, the
same habits, the same manners, . . . imbued with the same opinions. (1961 [1835],
p. 521)
The first spatially extended republic in history was built upon, as

Tocqueville foresaw (and considered the indispensable precondition for a
durable federation), the ethnic, linguistic and cultural uniformity, or at least
similarity, of citizens. If anything, this melting-pot vision of a homogeneous
empire-sized republic is being trumped today by the EU polity, in that the
latter has not only achieved the territorial expansion of an empire, but also
allows for and consistently encourages the maintenance of national and
regional diversity. The massive presence of entrenched, ineradicable, subterritorially based and legally recognized diversities makes up the most significant difference between the EU of the twenty-first century and the USA of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even though the melting pot of US society has turned into a proverbial mosaic in the twentieth century, the latter
refers to individual and group differences, not territorially entrenched and
195
localized ones.7 The European Union is the first spatially extended union of a
great number of highly distinctive peoples that is governed as a republican
regime. It reconciles the main attribute of an empire multinationality with
an essential quality of a republic, political freedom, the latter resulting from
the voluntary character of the former. To put it oxymoronically: the EU is a
republican empire.
Legitimacy in a Republican Empire with Redistributive Policies
But that oxymoron makes the question of legitimacy even more puzzling.
What is conceivably the normative basis of rule (and as such the equivalent to
either the force of imperial coercion or the bond of Tocquevillean similarity)
that might keep the Union together? Can the absence of coercion quasi-automatically produce feelings of mutual sympathy among the populations which
Mill claimed is an indispensable condition of durable federations, or is the
voluntary decision to join the federation in itself a sufficient warranty for its
durability? Is it the republican form of government political freedom
which is strong enough to bind a union of foreigners together, as suggested by
Habermas vision of a rise of supranational constitutional patriotism?
Note that there is a European tradition for dealing with a situation in which
groups are alien to or even have hostile feelings towards each other.
Europeans have found a way of coping with their mutual distinctiveness
within the relatively narrow and densely populated geographical boundaries
of the European continent. Here we refer, of course, to the principle of toleration, which developed in Europe during the second half of the seventeenth
century as a first step towards religious peace. After the disasters that plagued
the first half of the twentieth century and as a consequence thereof, nationalist collective feelings of grudge and hatred have largely faded away, although
national stereotypes, prejudices and a certain degree of distrust between the
populations of the EU member states clearly remain. Still, this has not
prevented the EU from becoming a closer union of European peoples, if
perhaps only in terms of its system of governance. This is aptly grasped in
Joseph Weilers statement:
In political terms, this Principle of Tolerance finds a remarkable expression in the
political organization of the Community which defies the normal premise of constitutionalism. . . . A majority demanding obedience from a minority which does not
regard itself as belonging to the same people is usually regarded as subjugation . . .
And yet, in the Community, we subject the European peoples to constitutional discipline even though the European polity is composed of distinct peoples. It is a
remarkable instance of civic tolerance to accept to be bound by precepts articulated
not by my people but by a community composed of distinct political communities:
a people, if you wish, of others. (2001, pp. 67f.)
196
The admittedly sometimes disgruntled acceptance of EU policies of

gender equality and anti-discrimination, which impose severe constraints upon
some member states and their political cultures, shows that the idea of constitutional tolerance is a real European phenomenon and not the offspring of
constitutional idealism. We should not overlook the fact that tolerance is not
an inherently democratic argument for legitimizing public policies (cf. Forst
2003); in the political history of Europe it evolved as a pre-democratic disposition of the absolutist state towards religious diversity. Modern democracies,
under the impact of a politics of difference, have become increasingly
responsive to their citizens demand for recognition of their identity and
respectful coexistence of their mutual otherness. Thus the respect for otherness has become an inherent element of the democratic cultures of (most of
the) current EU member states and can be extended relatively easily across
national boundaries, which in many respects have lost their exclusionary function. Although there is always some danger of backlash, the values of toleration and respectful coexistence seem to be firmly rooted in contemporary
European political culture. In that sense, Europe can be described as a political community of ethnic, religious, linguistic, historical and other communities (Kraus 2005).
What interests us here is the fact that this achievement is not primarily one
that can be attributed to the regime quality of liberal democracy. Apart from
the value of toleration being older than democracy, the latter, at least in its
majoritarian variants, does not inherently foster toleration. Liberal democracy,
on the other hand, has always been advocated and defended in terms of historical projects that were related to other emancipatory values, namely individual
freedom vs. authoritarianism, national unity and self-determination vs.
princely prerogatives and imperial rule, social progress vs. the rule of capital,
or international peace vs. belligerent dictatorship. In terms of these and similar oppositions, there has always been in the history of democratic thought and
practice a compellingly plausible answer to the question: What is democracy
good for? This plausibility, we submit, has to some extent faded away in
Europe, partly because its opposites (imperial rule, authoritarianism, the
denial of national self-determination) have disappeared from the scene, and
partly also because we see that large and persistent problems of social justice
defy the democratic method of rule, as the ubiquitous and, it would seem,
democratically irremediable crisis and decline of welfare states indicate.
Democracy is being separated from the social project, the national project and
(after the demise of state socialism) the anti-totalitarian project as well. Also
the verb to democratize has lost some of its normative appeal as it has turned
from a reflexive verb (doing something to yourself) into a transitive verb
(doing something to others), meaning that foreign states and their populations are made, in the name of their democratization, objects of wars, such
197
as in the current American war in Iraq. Others have argued that democracy is
essentially a domestic national regime form that loses much of its appeal and
potential under the prevailing conditions of globalization and denationalization (Zrn 1995; Leibfried and Zrn 2005).
Thus, in response to the question raised in the sub-title of the present essay,
democracy does not appear to be the answer to many, and arguably the most
pressing, of our contemporary problems. For the basic notion inherent in any
concept of democracy is a vertical one: we, the people, want to make sure
that our rulers up there do the right thing (the social democratic version) or
at least make sure that they do not do the wrong thing (that is, interfere with
our liberty the ever more popular libertarian version); and for this we need
the political resources afforded by democratic institutions. We are certainly far
from a situation in which these two versions of the failure of rule have become
irrelevant, and democratic antidotes obsolete. But there are other categories of
problems which are, so to speak, outside the reach of national forms and scales
of democracy.
What is the nature of these other problems? We think that they are located
in a horizontal dimension and thus do not affect the relation between the ruled
and their rulers, but instead involve border-crossing relations between the
ruled plus the rulers here and there. While constitutional toleration is a
norm that encourages difference-bridging and coexistence-enhancing practices here, what is called for in border-crossing relations is solidarity, perhaps
best defined as an attitude of practical non-indifference towards the needs and
rights of others who do not belong to our national citizenry. While national
citizenship has been defined as the right to have rights, solidarity within the
republican empire of the EU can only mean the denationalization of rights.
While democracy, as we have demonstrated, is inevitably tied to the demos of
a nation state, solidarity as the endowment of others with rights and claims is
an achievement that supranational agencies specialize in and derive their legitimacy from. To the extent that the EU (as a special case of a supranational
agency) is able to free rights, including social and economic rights, from their
national containers and make them available to all Union citizens, it gains
access to the same kind of legitimacy.
Border-transcending solidarity based upon the recognition of the rights of
others is no doubt a demanding and risky policy. Its proponents must have
institutional means at their disposal with which they can condition the willingness of Union citizens to share not just respect but also resources with
others, who are foreigners. It is one thing to recognize the other as an equal,
but it is much harder to share with him or her parts of ones income. For
instance, a Belgian steel worker must be prepared to accept income losses in
favour of, say, a Greek olive grower and the EU must be able to control political resources that induce him to do so. Democratizing Europe after the model
198
of the nation state will not increase but undermine the capacity of the Europolity to allocate rights and claims in a nation-blind manner. Even the most
robust national democracy (or, rather, precisely the most robust national
democracy) does not help here, as it will function as an obstacle to, rather than
a promoter of, such an institutionalized form of solidarity.
So far European citizens have been called upon to believe that negative
integration through market creation will trigger an ongoing positive-sum game
of Pareto optimality. As many Europeans, including entire European countries
and regions, are still awaiting the onset of this game, an equivalent effect can
be achieved through the carefully designed endowment of all Europeans with
social and economic rights. After the most recent enlargement by the ten
predominantly post-communist countries of Eastern and Central Europe, the
number of recipients of EU subsidies has considerably increased; hence the
sacrifices required by the populations of the relatively wealthy few net
contributors to EU funds may become so painful that their national governments are likely to limit their share, lest they fall victim to anti-European
popular movements. Thus constitutional tolerance is a necessary but in all
likelihood insufficient condition of the domestic legitimation of transnational
redistributive EU policies. The EU, in order to gain legitimacy through a
nation-blind and rights-based policy of solidarity among all Europeans needs
to acquire the political resources that emancipate it from the transnational
repercussions of national democracy.
Embryonic structural and institutional elements are visible within the
present set-up of the EU which hold out some hope for the project of a solidarity-based type of legitimacy. As Karl W. Deutsch pointed out a generation
ago, there are constellations among political units which may be conducive
to transnational solidarity, namely mutual interdependence and mutual
responsiveness (1970, pp. 34ff.; cf. Delhey 2004b). In both cases, political
units interact: in the former case due to a particular division of labour, in the
latter as a consequence of the capacity to perceive one anothers sensitive
spots or vital interests, and to make prompt and adequate responses to
each others critical needs (Deutsch 1970, p. 37). Mutual responsiveness is
largely experienced through transactions, that is, the exchange of information, ideas, capital, goods, services and people. According to Deutsch, not
only states but also individuals and populations can be integrated through
transactions and this also applies to the European Community (1972, pp.
133ff., 185ff.). While transactions do not necessarily create solidarity and
the willingness to share ones income with ones partners, a high volume and
frequency of economic, cultural or political transactions may have an
assimilatory impact upon people (Delhey 2004b, p. 12) and eventually
create trust among them. Whether this causality has materialized already
within the EU is far from clear, though. It is a matter of further empirical
199
research to explore the correlation of these data with the transactions among
the populations of the member states.
There are also embryonic institutional patterns that might be able to
develop into a culture of mutual responsiveness (Deutsch), both among the
citizens and member states. These would have to cultivate the capacity for
role-taking and self-distantiation, both based upon the demanding insight that
your interests and values are as strange to me as inversely my interests and
values are to you, while there is no standard by which one trumps the other.
We will conclude with a brief discussion of the nature and potential of Union
citizenship.
If the citizens of the Union, rather than member states, can advance to the
status of a constituent factor of the Union, this may be a step towards a kind
of democracy without a demos. This seemingly oxymoronic phenomenon
would mean that people who do not form one particular body of associates on
the basis of their (national and other) similarities, but rather share the characteristic of being alien to each other, are still able to make collectively binding
decisions. We consider the formation of a post-national collective agency as
the core problem of European democracy.
While the component elements of the EU are: (i) member states, and (ii)
citizens, under the present rules there is no corporate body which represents
the citizenry of the Union per se. The European Parliament is the representative body of the peoples of the member states,8 that is, national subcollectivities of European citizens. However, the right of the citizens of the
member states to stand as candidates in elections to the European Parliament
and in municipal elections in their state of residence under the same conditions as nationals of that state is indicative of the fact that the voters in the
member states do not have be represented by their fellow nationals; nonnationals, too, may run and win in national elections to the EP. In other
words, democratic representation in the European Parliament and in the
municipalities of the member states has already marginally overcome the
nationality principle and tends to allow for the representation of diversity.
A French citizen who has been elected to the EP on a German party list
represents neither German nor French citizens; his status is explicitly
detached from his national origin as the necessary condition of his taking the
role of a representative. What he represents, in a way, is the multinational
character of the Union, and citizens voting for him or her would thereby
express their commitment to the trans- or supranational character of
European politics. On the other hand, and for the time being, the dominant
interpretation (and reality) is of course that nationals of member states, not
European citizens, are represented in the EP.
However, an increased significance of the nationally de-coloured EU
citizen might be implied by the TCE coming into effect. It envisages that the
200
citizens of the Union are directly represented at Union level in the European
Parliament.9 The qualification directly suggests that they are so far only
indirectly represented through their affiliation to a member state. So far, the
national coding of representation stands in the way of the formation and
strengthening of forces that can act independently of national affiliation. The
unique trait of the notion of Union citizenship is the dissociation of nationality and citizenship. This status connects people who are strangers by conventional legal, political and cultural standards to an abstract and overarching
community of citizens. The recognition of the foreigner as a fellow citizen,
and the solidarity out of which foreign representational needs are catered to,
is clearly a fundamental challenge to the Europeans entrenched tradition of
regarding only co-nationals as fellow citizens.
It is this embryonic form of non-nation-based citizenship which suggests an
entirely new construction of the we in the field of political action. This
construction would only be a further step in the long and multifaceted history
of the idea of citizenship.10 Might Union citizenship define a new political
identity, a new we which is able to shape the fates of people in a new manner?
To conclude, the problem of European democracy is not that there is no
European demos. The demos presupposes the fusion of the many into one
body whose coercive character requires homogeneity of the rulers and the
ruled in order to legitimize the necessity of obedience. This is not the political
vision of the European Union. The vision is, rather, the idea of solidarity
grounded in the mutual recognition of otherness. This vision, it appears to us,
derives its legitimacy from being appropriate to a world where people have
become neighbours and still remain strangers to each other. This genuine political and institutional innovation is the contribution of Europe to the problems
of our world at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
NOTES
1.
2.
Pursuant to Article 201 TEC, however, the European Parliament can introduce a motion of
censure on the activities of the Commission. If it is carried by a two-thirds majority of the
votes cast, representing a majority of the Members of the European Parliament, the
Commission has to resign as a body. The same rule is stipulated in Articles I-26 paragraph
8 and III-340 of the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe (TCE), signed in Rome
on 29 October 2004 and due to enter into force by 1 November 2006, provided that all signatory states have ratified the treaty by then (Article IV-447). Given the fact that the EP is not
organized along the governmentopposition divide, this high quorum for the motion of
censure can hardly be fulfilled. In fact, no motion of censure against the Commission has
ever been successful. Even the Santer Commission, which resigned on 15 March 1999 after
an investigation into allegations of corruption, had easily survived a vote of no confidence
on 17 December 1998.
In this respect a major change is envisaged by the TCE in that the national parliaments will
be empowered to enter into the political arena of the EU and to play an important role there.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
201
Protocol No. 1 to the TCE (which will be no less binding than the Treaty itself after ratification) recognizes the significance of national parliaments for the particular constitutional
organization and practice of each member state and encourages their greater involvement in
the activities of the EU. For instance, parliaments are entitled to be provided with more thorough information from the Commission. All relevant documents and draft legislative acts of
the EU are therefore to be forwarded to them, and they may send to the President of the
European Parliament, the Council and the Commission reasoned opinions on whether a draft
legislative act complies with the principle of subsidiarity laid down in Article I-11 para 3
TCE. Second, pursuant to Protocol No. 2 they are involved in the supervision of the application of the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality (the latter being laid down in
Article I-11 para 4). Any draft legislative act must contain a detailed statement as to its
implications for the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality. If the aforementioned
reasoned opinions are put forward by one-third of the national parliaments, that act must be
reviewed. Moreover, each national parliament has the right to appeal to the European Court
of Justice on grounds of infringement of the principle of subsidiarity. These rules, although
purely procedural, force the Commission to take the political particularities and problems of
member states into account and to respect the need of their parliaments and governments to
legitimize their policies. Admittedly, this falls short of the stimulating proposal of uniting the
national parliaments of Europe and assigning them an active role as a European political
actor suggests (Grzinger 2003).
In order to become, say, a legitimate member of parliament in the nation state X, a person
must not only win a mandate on the basis of fair, clean and contested elections, but must also
hold the national citizenship of X. How could it be otherwise? The virtual self-evidence of
this norm shows how deeply legitimation is rooted in the notion of demos and demotic identity. This demotic principle applies also to the members of the EP, who are elected by the
citizens of their country of citizenship, and whose number of seats corresponds (in somewhat modified ways) to the size of population of their country of citizenship.
Although, admittedly, it does not even aspire to this goal.
This conceptual ambiguity was already captured by Toqueville when he anticipated a polity
(actually, quite similar to the EU) which would be a form of society . . . in which several
states are fused into one with regard to certain common interests, although they remain
distinct, or only confederate, with regard to all other concerns. In this case the central power
acts directly upon the governed . . ., but in a more limited circle. Short of using the sui
generis formula, he adds that the new word which ought to express this novel thing does
not yet exist (Tocqueville 1835 [1990], pp. 158f.).
The status treaty is a well-known institution of public international law. Such a treaty is
present if a group of Great powers, or a large number of States . . . assume a power to
create by a multipartite treaty some new international rgime or status, which soon
acquires a degree of acceptance and durability extending beyond the limits of the actual
contracting parties, and giving it an objective existence (Int. Court of Justice, Reports of
Judgments, Advisory Opinions and Orders, Int. Status of South-West Africa, Separate
Opinion of Judge McNair, pp. 146163 [153f.]; see also Dahm 1958, pp. 23ff.; Klein
1980).
It is not by accident that the Afro-Americans as beings of an inferior order (as the Supreme
Court decreed in the Dred Scott case of 1857) were legally excluded from the polity until
the 14th Amendment (1867) and socially until the Supreme Courts decision in Brown v.
Board of Education (1954).
Articles 189, 190 TEC [Treaty of Nice]; pursuant to Article I-20 TCE, the EP shall be
composed of representatives of the Unions citizens. Since the number of seats is apportioned according to the population size of the member states, the representatives remain
essentially representatives of their peoples.
Article I-46 para 2.
Cf. Riesenberg (1992)
202
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8. The neo-functionalists were (almost)

right: politicization and European
integration
Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks
In a recent paper, Philippe Schmitter laments that no theory of regional integration has been as misunderstood, caricatured, pilloried, proven wrong and
rejected as often as neo-functionalism (2002, p. 1). And he goes on to explicate, embrace and elaborate neo-functionalism in his inimitable way.
Almost 50 years of neo-functionalism have taught us a thing or two about
regional integration. Neo-functionalism identifies basic building blocks for
any valid theory of the subject and, more generally, for any valid theory of
jurisdictional architecture.
Neo-functionalism argues that regional integration is shaped by its functional consequences the Pareto gains accruing to integration but that functional needs alone cannot explain integration. Regional integration gives rise
to potent political tensions. It shakes up relative capabilities, creates new
inequalities, and transforms preferences. Above all, it leads to politicization, a
general term for the process by which the political conflicts unleashed by integration come back to shape it. Neo-functionalists recognize that a decisive
limitation of functionalism is that it does not engage the political consequences of its own potential success. What happens when the objects of
regional integration citizens and political parties wake up and became its
arbiters?
In this chapter, we begin by taking a close look at how neo-functionalism
and its precursor, functionalism, conceive the politics of regional integration.
Then we turn to the evidence of the past two decades and ask how politicization has shaped the level, scope and character of European integration.
FUNCTIONALITY AND POLITICS

Neo-functionalisms point of departure is that functional efficiency is the
engine of regional integration. The functional premise remains a vital one in
205
206
regional integration theory. It grounds Sandholtz and Stone Sweets transactionalist theory of supranational governance (1998; Stone Sweet, Sandholtz
and Fligstein 2001), Pollacks application of principalagent theory to the
European Union (2003), and Moravcsiks liberal institutionalist account of EU
treaty making (1998).
Functionalism identifies a rational basis for political choice. Welfare gains
or losses Mitranys common index of need (1966, p. 159) determine
whether a particular policy will, or will not, be selected. Neo-functionalists
counter that functional pressures are necessary, but not sufficient, to change
the scope, level or character of regional integration. They conceptualize three
intervening processes. Functional spillover occurs when an original integrative goal can be assured only by integration in a functionally related area.
Externalization describes the pressure on the members of a regional regime to
adopt a single, and therefore integrative, policy towards third parties. And,
most importantly, politicization describes a process by which regional integration becomes contested among a widening circle of political actors
(Schmitter 1969).
This stands in stark contrast to functional theory. Functionalism assumes
the inevitability of socio-economic gradualism and the supremacy of welfare
and technology over power politics (Pentland 1975, p. 9). Functional needs
are presumed to have self-evident consequences for the scope, level and character of regional organization. As integration bears fruit, so experts and beneficiaries learn that integration can effectively be extended to other practical,
non-controversial needs. But there is a certain automaticity to the process.
Hard political choices, political mobilization and, above all, conflict are irrelevant or harmful. David Mitrany argued that successful integration requires
consensus about practical goals and abstinence from power politics. As
Caporaso points out,
Functionalists . . . believe in the possibility of defining certain nonpolitical aspects
of human needs, nonpolitical in the sense that there is a high level of consensus
concerning them. Such areas are labeled technical or welfare-oriented . . . The
end result would be a community in which interest and activity are congruent and
in which politics is replaced by problem-solving. (1972, p. 27)
Politicization is the point at which functionalists and neo-functionalists part

company. For Ernst Haas, Leon Lindberg and the early Philippe Schmitter,
politics is not a drag on regional integration, but an essential ingredient. Haas
Uniting of Europe: political, social and economic forces, 19501957 is a study
of political calculation of nationally constituted groups with specific interests and aims, willing and able to adjust their aspirations by turning to supranational means when this course appears profitable (1958, p. xiv). Schmitter
argues that, alone, functional interdependence based on high rates of mutual
The neo-functionalists were (almost) right
207
transactions is impotent. It must be perceived, interpreted, and translated into

expressions of interest, strategies of influence, and viable decision making
styles (1969, p. 164). Functionality the Pareto gains accruing from integration is the engine, but politicization is the drive shaft a decisive intervening variable determining whether, when and how functional pressures lead
to regional integration.
At its core, politicization refers to the increasing contentiousness of decision making. According to Schmitter,
[p]oliticization . . . refers initially to a process whereby a) the controversiality of
joint decision making goes up. This in turn is likely to lead to b) a widening of the
audience or clientele interested and active in integration. Somewhere along the line
c) a manifest redefinition of mutual objectives will probably occur. . . . It . . .
involves some collective recognition that the original objectives have been attained
. . . and that the new ones involving an upward shift in either scope or level of
commitment are operative. Ultimately, one could hypothesize that . . . there will be
d) a shift in actor expectations and loyalty toward the new regional center. (1969,
p. 166 [original emphasis; alphabetization added])
The early neo-functionalists were sanguine that politicization would raise

the level and extend the scope of regional integration. A federal polity, or
something like it, would result. Haas described the European Economic
Community in 1958 as a new centre, whose institutions possess or demand
jurisdiction over the pre-existing ones (1958, p. 16). He argued that even
though supranationality in practice has developed into a hybrid in which
neither the federal nor the intergovernmental tendency has clearly triumphed,
these relationships have sufficed to create expectations and shape attitudes
which will undoubtedly work themselves out in the direction of more integration (1958, pp. 526527 [our emphasis]).
But as early as 1969, Schmitter was at pains to assume no automaticity,
fixed sequence or unidirectionality (1969, 1970). Reflecting on the original
research programme three decades later, he stresses that neo-functionalists had
too rosy a view of the transformation of governance, and notes that any
comprehensive theory of integration should potentially be a theory of disintegration (2002, p. 2).
So regional integration can contract as well as expand. Haas, Lindberg and
others began also to doubt their initial prediction of a single end point, a
European federation, and conceived of several possible outcomes. In a
provocative piece initially written just after the Maastricht negotiations,
Schmitter (1996) conceptualized non-state scenarios characterized by growing
dissociation between territorial constituencies and functional competencies
(see also 2000, p. 15). Ironically, given their differences, neo-functionalists
and functionalists converge in their speculations about the jurisdictional architecture of integration. Mitrany was a passionate opponent of federalism, which
208
he felt was rigid (1948, reprinted in 1966). Schmitter is sceptical of federal

schemes for Europe,
. . . because, in the immediate future, the Europolity is likely to retain the status of
a nonstate and nonnation it would be inappropriate and even counterproductive
to define its citizens, representatives, and rulers in the usual manner for a largescale, socially heterogeneous, advanced capitalist nation-state, that is, in the manner
of a federal polity. (2000, p. 15)
The most extreme non-state scenario conceptualized by Schmitter condominio (1996) shares some basic features with David Mitranys functional
vision. The European polity has no fixed centre, but is a network of jurisdictions with variable membership, variable decision rules and of variable durability, depending on need and acceptability. These features, we will argue, are
strengthened by politicization.
THE STRUCTURE OF POLITICAL CONFLICT

Neo-functionalism kicked off a 30-year research programme analysing politicization in the European Union (Lindberg and Scheingold 1970). One neofunctionalist prediction has come to pass: European integration has become
more controversial, as Schmitter foresaw. What few predicted is that the sign
would be negative.
Support for European integration among the public has not risen, and in
some countries has declined, since the early 1990s (Eichenberg and Dalton
1993, 2003; Franklin, McLaren and Marsh 1994). Elites were always likely to
be more favourably oriented to integration than the public as a whole; a fact
that has become politically combustible as European integration has instigated
27 national referenda in 19 member and candidate countries since the
Maastricht Accord (1991).1 In short, Leon Lindbergs permissive consensus
has been transformed into something approximating to its opposite, a
constraining dissensus (Olsen 2004; Hix 1999; Hooghe and Marks 1999; van
der Eijk and Franklin 1996; Marks and Steenbergen 2004; Niedermayer and
Sinnott 1995).
At the same time, the interested audience has widened, again as predicted
by neo-functionalists. The mobilization of interest groups, social movements,
unions, firms and subnational governments at the European level has generated a broad stream of research substantiating the neo-functionalist expectation that, Once a regional integration scheme is established, it may serve as
the stimulus for private groups to create . . . regional organizations to reflect
and protect their common interests (Nye 1970, p. 205; Imig and Tarrow
2001; Marks, Haesly, and Mbaye 2002; Marks and McAdam 1996; Mazey
209
and Richardson 2001; Streeck and Schmitter 1991; Wessels 2004). The issues
arising from European integration reach deeply into political parties and into
the public itself.
Even in the early days, neo-functionalists were alert to the fact that domestic conflict about European integration could stretch beyond sectoral or business associations. Ernst Haas stressed that sectoral associations leant heavily
on their national governments where their particular economic interests were
concerned a line of analysis that was later taken up by intergovernmentalists
but he was also keenly aware that political parties were decisive both for the
creation of a coherent Euro-polity and because, in Europe, government is party
government. In The Uniting of Europe (1958) Haas begins by describing in
detail the positioning of political parties in the major party families, and moves
on to national trade associations, trade unions and national governments.
The difference now is that decision making on big issues has shifted away
from producers. The positioning of political parties and of citizens has, since
the Maastricht Accord, grown in relative importance while that of sectoral
associations has declined.
How, then, does conflict over European integration connect to the dimensions that structure public opinion and competition among political parties?
The first of these dimensions is an economic left/right dimension concerned
with economic redistribution, welfare and government regulation of the economy. Contestation on this dimension has predominated in most Western
nations in the post-war period (Bartolini and Mair 1990; Lipset and Rokkan
1967), and is diagnosed as the main dimension in Central and Eastern Europe
(Evans and Whitefield 1993; Kitschelt et al. 1999). A second, non-economic
or cultural, new politics dimension has gained strength since the 1970s in
Europe in the East as well as in the West (Evans and Whitefield 1993;
Flanagan 1987; Franklin 1992; Inglehart 1977; Kitschelt 1995). In some societies this dimension is oriented to environmental protection; in others, it
captures conflict over traditional values rooted in a secular/religious divide; in
others still, it is pitched around immigration and defence of the national
community. We therefore describe the poles of this dimension using composite terms: Green/Alternative/Libertarian (or Gal and Traditionalist/
Authoritarian/Nationalist (or Tan) (Hooghe, Marks, Wilson 2002).
Left/Right
When EU issues have distributional economic effects within societies as is
the case for social policy, employment policy and, above all, for policies that
reduce the transaction costs of international economic exchange the positions that political parties take can be predicted from their left/right location
(Table 8.1).
210
Table 8.1 Left/right positioning and position on economic EU policies

(correlations)
Internal Market
Employment
Cohesion
General position
0.34
0.53
0.25
0.04
Note: Data from the Chapel Hill 2002 party expert dataset, tapping 238 country experts to evaluate the ideological and EU policy locations of 98 political parties in the West (EU-15 minus
Luxembourg). Experts locate parties on a scale from 1 (strongly opposed) to 7 (strongly favouring). Parties weighted by vote percentage in the most recent national election.
Internal Market: Consider internal market liberalization. Some parties want to strengthen EU
powers in the internal market and competition policy. Other parties are reluctant to support
stronger EU powers for internal market liberalization.
Employment: Consider EU employment policy. Some political parties want the EU to strengthen
its common employment policy; they view EU employment policy as a means toward reducing
unemployment. Other parties argue against a common employment policy.
Cohesion: Consider EU cohesion or regional policy. This policy transfers resources to the poorest regions in the EU, and is the second item on the EU budget. Some political parties wish to
maintain or expand the EUs cohesion policy, whereas others wish to reduce or eliminate it.
General Position: How would you describe the general position on European integration that the
partys leadership has taken over the course of 2002?
To return to the level/scope distinction, distributional politics directly

engages the scope, but not the level of integration. Should the EU spend
money to reduce unemployment, aid poorer regions or promote social cohesion? The debate is about for whom, from whom, and how much; it is not
intrinsically about by whom. Hix (1999), Pollack (2000) and others have
pointed out that left/right speaks to supranationalism with many voices. The
logic, as in the USA, is one of regime shopping. When liberals were ascendant at the federal level of the USA, conservatives found themselves
convinced of the virtue of states rights. Now that conservatives are ascendant,
it is the liberals turn. What matters is the structure of political opportunity as
it exists in a particular time and place.
In the context of the EU, the economic right is satisfied with the combination of market integration and nationally segmented political authority. Market
integration involves the creation of a single market, a transnational goal that
demands limited supranational authority. Neo-liberals support European institutions, and the European Court of Justice in particular, to achieve negative
integration (Scharpf 1996). But it would be self-defeating for neo-liberals to
extend the scope of integration in ways that would diminish regulatory competition.
Those on the economic left wish to create redistributive capacity at the
European level, but they do not want to constrain redistribution and other
211
social democratic policies at the national level. Left parties were the chief
concern of early integrators, including Jean Monnet, who realized that such
parties might resist functional economic integration on distributional grounds.
Monnet made every effort to persuade socialist party and trade union leaders
that European integration deserved their support. By the late 1950s, Ernst
Haas identified a sinistration of support for a federal Europe (1958, p. xiv).
But the debate on European integration was still raging among French and
British socialists in the early 1980s. Most socialists eventually came to the
conclusion that, if exit was impossible, they should try to extend the scope of
integration to include the distributional policies that were in Jacques Delors
vision.
We detected this in the mid-1990s (Hooghe and Marks 1996, 1999), but in
the meantime the lefts enthusiasm for the Delors project of regulated capitalism has cooled. Although European political economies are more welfareoriented and redistributive than the US, they vary in ways that make
convergence on a single European model the least likely of future scenarios.
Institutional variation across the EU sharply constrains the feasible scope of
continent-wide regulation. Step-by-step integration the (neo-)functional
recipe is inhibited by country-specific institutional complementarities
among institutions responsible for economic governance (Crouch and Streeck
1997; Streeck 1996; Hall and Soskice 2001).2 Moreover, institutional differences exist within, as well as among, countries that are said to have a particular type of governance. Denmark, for example, finances its welfare state
primarily through income taxation, while Sweden relies to a much greater
extent on social security contributions, a contrast that would complicate integration of these social democratic welfare regimes (Scharpf 1999).
Moreover, social democrats have become acutely aware that redistribution
is constrained by cultural diversity (Offe 2000). The relationship can be
hypothesized as a law of culturally constrained redistribution: the more
culturally diverse a polity, the smaller the scope for redistribution. At one end
of the scale are encompassing global organizations, including the UN, the
World Bank and the WTO, which redistribute at most a tiny fraction of global
GDP. At the other extreme are relatively homogenous national polities, which
redistribute up to about one-third of the national product. While the EU is
more culturally coherent than most other international regimes, it is considerably more diverse that the most diverse federal states. No other international
or transnational regime redistributes anything like the 0.8 per cent of GDP that
the EU devotes to agricultural and cohesion funding. Because a shared sense
of community is lacking in Europe, it is difficult for social democrats to
campaign for more.
Given that neither the left nor the right has managed to achieve durable
political hegemony at the continental level, and given high decisional barriers
212
for institutional innovation, the struggle over economic redistribution has not
done much to deepen integration.3 The main thrust of integration has been
functional, not redistributive. The scope and level of regional integration in
Europe has been constrained by the area of agreement between centre left and
centre right on the collective benefits of internal peace and transnational
economic exchange. European integration has largely followed the prescriptions of classical federalism: (a) centralize those areas of public policy where
economies of scale are present; (b) internalize positive and negative externalities by encompassing in the relevant jurisdiction all those affected by the
policy; (c) otherwise, decentralize.
Does this mean that left/right conflict has no bearing on European integration? Not quite. Functionalism is opaque. What does affected by the policy
mean? Was slavery in the South an externality for those in the North of the
United States? Does the denial of equal pay for women, or of political rights
for immigrants, in one part of the Union affect citizens in another part? This
invites a debate about the implications of cohesion in a political community, a
debate that is fundamental to the left/right divide. The front line of redistributive conflict in the EU is in the application of European-wide regulation in
areas such as social policy and environmental policy (Caporaso 2000; Falkner
1998; Leibfried and Pierson 1995; Sbragia 1996).
So the conclusion to this section is double-edged. Distributional conflict
has not driven regional integration forward. But social regulation (with distributional consequences) is an ineluctable tension in regional integration.
Functionalism cannot arbitrate conflict over the allocation of authority in a
multi-level polity. The struggle between left and right over social regulation
leads to unstable and contested outcomes about the scope of policy, in which
the level of policy-making the degree of supranationalism is a by-product
reflecting which side happens to have authority at which level.
Identity
Functionalists and neo-functionalists alike stressed the constraining effects of
national identity on integration.
We are favored by the need and the habit of material cooperation; we are hampered
by the general clinging to political segregation. How to reconcile these two trends,
both of them natural and both of them active, is the main problem for political
invention at this juncture of history. (Mitrany 1948 [1966], p. 151)
But functionalists and neo-functionalists believed that national identity

would ultimately give way to a more encompassing loyalty. According to
Mitrany, national identity is just one, and not the most important, kind of identity: Each of us is in fact a bundle of functional loyalties; so that to build a
213
world community upon such a conception is merely to extend and consolidate

it also between national societies and groups (1965 [1966], p. 204). In one of
the first analyses of public opinion on European integration, Ronald Inglehart
predicted that a shift of loyalties was a matter of generational replacement.
Younger cohorts, he argued, were being socialized in societies where nationalism was discredited and where supranational institutions were providing an
expanding range of collective goods (Inglehart 1970, pp. 182190).
Recent research arrives at a different verdict: national identity remains a
supremely powerful constraint on preferences concerning the level of
European integration (Carey 2002; Hooghe and Marks 2005; McLaren 2002;
Hermann, Brewer and Risse 2004). This is true both for political parties and
for the general public.
As noted above, national identity connects to the second dimension of conflict
across Western societies, which we describe as a Green/Alternative/Libertarian
(or Gal) versus Traditionalist/Authoritarian/Nationalist (or Tan) dimension.
The position of a political party on the Gal/Tan dimension powerfully
predicts its position on European issues that engage the level of integration.
So, as Table 8.2 reveals, party location on Gal/Tan is strongly associated with
Table 8.2 Gal/Tan positioning and position on institutional EU policies
(correlations)
EP Powers
Enlargement
General position
West
East
0.50
0.38
0.30
0.57
0.71
0.65
Note: Data from the 2002 Chapel Hill party expert dataset, tapping 238 country experts to evaluate the ideological and EU policy locations of 98 political parties in the West (EU-15 minus
Luxembourg) and 73 in the East (EU-12 minus Cyprus, Estonia and Malta). Experts locate parties
on a scale from 1 (strongly opposed) to 7 (strongly favouring). Parties weighted by vote percentage in most recent national election.
EP Powers: Take the position of the party leadership on the powers of the European Parliament.
Some parties want more powers for the European Parliament. Other parties argue there is no need
to expand the powers of the European Parliament further.
Enlargement (West): Consider enlargement to Central and Eastern European countries. Some
parties believe that the new countries should have exactly the same rights and duties as existing
members. Others believe there should be separate rules for them (for example, on agricultural
policy, cohesion policy, internal market, movement of people, currency).
Enlargement (East): Consider EU enlargement to the candidate countries of post-communist
Europe. Some parties strongly support major domestic reforms to qualify for EU membership as
soon as possible. Other parties oppose major domestic reforms to qualify for EU membership as
soon as possible.
General Position: How would you describe the general position on European integration that the
partys leadership has taken over the course of 2002?
214
positioning on European integration in general and on the powers of the

European Parliament. The association is anchored on the right side of this
dimension by parties with a strong Tan leaning for example the Front
National, Vlaams Blok/Belang, Austrian Freiheitliche Partei and Danske
Folkspartiet. This is a relatively new phenomenon. In 1984, the first year for
which we have reliable data on party positioning, the main source of opposition
to European integration came from social democratic parties. Not until the mid1990s was the largest reservoir of opposition on the radical right (Hooghe,
Marks and Wilson 2002; Taggart 1998). Such parties oppose integration
because it undermines national sovereignty. They link European integration to
other perceived threats to the national community: foreign cultural influences,
cosmopolitan elites, international agencies and, above all, immigrants.
National identity also mobilizes Euro-scepticism in conservative parties
with a national character as in Britain, France, Ireland and Spain.
Conservative parties in these countries combine defence of the national
community with support for market solutions. European integration puts these
in tension, fuelling conflict between market liberals, who are willing to water
down national sovereignty in the cause of market competition, and nationoriented traditionalists, who are not. The result is internal party dissension that
in some cases the British Conservatives and the French Gaullists has
threatened to tear these parties apart.
By the mid-1990s, the political mobilization of national identity led to the
dextrification of opposition to European integration. Enlargement to Central
and Eastern Europe has reinforced, not weakened, this. The strongest opposition to European integration in Central and Eastern, as in Western Europe, is
found among parties that espouse traditionalist, nation-centred ideologies
(Marks et al. 2006).
National identity also constrains public opinion on European integration,
but in a double-edged way. On the one hand, national identity and European
identity reinforce each other. In his dissertation on the topic, Richard Haesly
(2001) finds a positive, rather than negative, association between being Welsh
or Scottish and being European. European allegiance can fruitfully be
conceived as embedded in national allegiance (van Kersbergen 2000).
But it is also true that many opponents of European integration see themselves as defending their nations against control from Brussels. Diz Medrano
(2003) details how national histories condition the consequences of national
identity for support for European integration: English Euro-scepticism is
rooted in Britains special history of empire; West German pro-Europeanism
reflects Second World War guilt; the Spanish tend to support European integration as a proxy for modernization and democratization (see also Strth and
Triandafyllidou 2003).
National identities are formed early in life, as Inglehart recognized in his
215
1970 piece. Children as young as six or seven know full well whether they are
English, German or Swedish. But the impact of identity on political attitudes
is neither automatic nor uniform. The connection between a persons identity
and her attitude toward European integration is constructed in political debate,
and that construction is cued by national political parties, national elites
and national media. Where the political elite is more or less united on Europe,
national identity and European integration tend to coexist; where it is
divided, national identity feeds Euro-scepticism (Hooghe and Marks 2004).
Neo-functionalists recognized that regional integration had to be understood as a broadly based political process that engaged a variety of domestic
actors, not just national governments. They believed politicization would
deepen European integration. But did neo-functionalists get the sign right?4
If one were to extrapolate the experience of contestation over redistribution
and identity described above, one would be compelled to answer no.
Politicization appears to be at least at this point in history neither positive
nor open-ended with respect to regional integration. If recent research is valid,
politicization is powerfully shaped by nationalist reaction to perceived loss of
community and national sovereignty.
In retrospect, it seems unexceptional that a quantum shift in authority
which is, after all, what sixty years of European integration adds up to should
jolt nationally embedded emotions. A student of modern European history
might heed a simple warning: Never underestimate nationalism. Group
attachments can be extraordinarily powerful, and few more so than attachments to territorially defined communities. The mobilization of exclusive
national identity in defence of national sovereignty is a predictable reaction to
Europeanization.
Neo-functionalists and functionalists feared as much, and they urged a
course of incremental steps that would lead Europe around, not through,
national identity. This was the guiding principle of the Monnet method, a neofunctionalist strategy prior to the theory (Duchne 1994). Mitrany believed
that the creation of multiple functional regimes would defuse nationalist reaction. It was better that authority seep away from national states in several
directions, rather than towards a single new centre.
One neo-functionalist caveat is in order here. We have witnessed the politicization of identity in the EU in the absence of the most powerful force that
has shaped it historically: external conflict. Neo-functionalists argue that
externalization solidarity induced by conflict with a foreign power can be
a powerful source of integration. Could this shape European integration?
There is no prospect (at present) that the European Union could engage in the
kind of war-making that consolidated national identities and states in Europe
(Tilly 1990), but the current push for a common foreign and security policy at
the European level appears to be a reaction to sustained US unilateralism.
216
POLITICIZATION AND THE FORM OF MULTI-LEVEL

GOVERNANCE
The politicization of integration, and in particular the mobilization of national
identity, has constrained European political architecture. The functional logic
of regional integration is as strong as it ever was, but the institutional strategy is changing. Instead of seeing an ever more extensive set of policies
bundled in a coherent European federal polity a common set of policies for
a given territory we seem to have witnessed a growing dissociation between
territory and function. The result is a system of multi-level governance which
takes on the characteristics of a consortio modified by growing reliance on
condominio.
Practising neo-functionalists, including Jean Monnet, conceived their challenge to be the building of Europe in the absence of Europeans. They believed
that Europeans could be created indirectly, as citizens felt the policy effects of
regional integration and transferred their loyalties accordingly. Regional integration was to be built piecemeal, in the confident expectation that the emergent polity would be considered legitimate. The strategy was to shift an ever
wider set of competencies from national states to Europe. Each act of integration was justified in its own terms, but the effect was to transform European
political architecture in a federal direction. This strategy survived Charles de
Gaulle in the 1960s and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. These leaders
rejected supranationalism, but accepted the logic of piecemeal integration
where justified on efficiency grounds.
From a functionalist standpoint, a federal Euro-stato would be a king with
no functional clothes as Mitrany wrote in a blistering critique of Walter
Hallsteins federal plans (Mitrany 1965). A European federation was a political goal cherished by post-war elites who had to contend with the absence of
Europeans. In more recent times, reformers have also had to confront populist
nationalism. No major policy area has escaped Europeanization to some
degree, but domestic support for European supranationalism is as weak as it
has ever been. Enlargement to Central and Eastern Europe appears to have
hardened rather than softened the edge of national opposition, as one might
expect in countries that have been denied independence for so long (Taggart
and Sczerbiak 2004). At the extreme, minorities in several EU member states
appear willing to sacrifice functional benefits of cooperation on the altar of
national sovereignty. While their numbers are proportionately low, they
threaten to take political advantage of the gap that exists in every EU society
between Europhile elites and a more sceptical public. The nationalist right
punches above its weight in referenda on European issues. It is ironic that the
most important innovation in democratic practice arising from European integration has become its greatest obstacle.
217
How can one reap the collective gains of transnational cooperation without
running foul of national identity? This is the challenge for elites seeking to
safeguard the functional benefits of cooperation (Hooghe 2003). Their answer
appears consistent with the following principles:5
Focus on policy problems for which decision making can convey transparent benefits to stakeholders.
Separate policy problems into discrete chunks. Minimize policy externalities; maximize decomposability.
Tailor decision rules to the particular task at hand.
To the extent that pareto-optimal solutions involve redistribution, pick
problems where side-payments are feasible.
What kind of polity would emerge if cooperation on certain functions was
desirable, but member states tailored it to the problem rather than to existing
European institutions? Independent European agencies for, among other
things, aviation, drug addiction, the environment, food safety, maritime safety,
medical product evaluation, satellites, training, work safety and health, and
vocational training are examples. And what if certain forms of integration
were considered efficient for some member states, but not for others? This
question was raised sharply on monetary union and for social policy, and the
institutional solution has been to allow individual member states to derogate,
that is opt out, if they so wish.
Schmitter, who saw more clearly than any of his contemporaries the
storm gathering over Maastricht, speculated about the form that regional
integration might be taking. What if either the functional or the territorial
domains (and even more if both) were not congruent with the same authority? (1996, p. 132). Schmitter diagnosed three alternatives to a federal
state. A confederatio is a loose arrangement in which territorial units may
enter or exit at will, but where functional competencies are rigorously fixed
in order to protect members from encroachment by central authorities. In a
consortio a fixed number of national authorities cooperate on a variety of
functional tasks through specific, flexible, and overlapping institutional
arrangements. And finally the most unprecedented, even unimaginable,
outcome of all (p. 136) is the condominio, where both territorial units and
functional tasks vary to create multiple specialized, flexible, and overlapping regimes.
Instead of one Europe with recognized and contiguous boundaries, there would be
many Europes. Instead of a Eurocracy accumulating organizationally distinct but
politically coordinated tasks around a single center there could be multiple regional
institutions acting autonomously to solve common problems and produce different
public goods. (p. 136)
218
Consternation and disbelief greeted this possibility when Schmitter

presented it at Nuffield College Oxford, where one of the authors was lodged
in 1992, but with the help of hindsight, Philippes contemporaries are catching
up.
NOTES
1.
This includes nine referenda in 2004 accession countries as well as four referenda on the
European Constitutional Treaty. Source: Centre dtudes et de documentation sur la dmocratie directe in Geneva, Switzerland (http://c2d.unige.ch/, accessed 16 May, 2006).
2. Scharpf (2001) makes the point that preferences differ across countries in ways that decisively
constrain integration. He observes that the British would revolt against the high taxes that
sustain the generous Swedish welfare state, that Swedes would not settle for a poorly funded
educational system as in Germany; and that German doctors and patients would protest
against attempts to emulate the British national health system.
3. It therefore comes as no surprise that the left/right dimension only weakly frames public opinion on European integration. A variable that taps left/right self-placement is significant under
controls if allowance is made (via an interaction term) for the fact that in Scandinavia, in
contrast to the rest of the EU, it is the left, not the right, that is more opposed to integration.
But the size of the effect is small (Hooghe and Marks 2005).
4. In a recent publication, Schmitter acknowledges that neofunctionalist theory underestimated
the enduring character of national identity and its constraining effect on European integration
(2002). As we have noted, this criticism is least appropriate for Schmitters own work.
5. Elsewhere we describe this as type 2 governance, oriented around task-specific jurisdictions,
which can be contrasted with type 1 governance, oriented around general-purpose jurisdictions (Hooghe and Marks 2003).
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9. Collective participation in the

European Union: the Euro
corporatism debate
Gerda Falkner
Philippe C. Schmitters impact on the study of European integration can
hardly be overestimated. In addition to his work on (neo-functionalist) integration theory,1 on Euro-democracy2 and on EU enlargement,3 his, partly coauthored, articles on EU-level interest representation and publicprivate
relations in policy-making have also been path breaking.
This chapter will place Schmitters work in the wider context of recent
writing on EU-level interest representation and interest politics. I will begin
by discussing his conclusions and those of others on the issue. Since the
differences mainly result from different notions of corporatism and its rivals
such as pluralism and statism, it is important to mention already at this point
that the approach of this chapter is to regard corporatism as a two-dimensional phenomenon without a predetermined policy outcome (following early
texts by Schmitter and Lehmbruch), which exists in different generations
corresponding to changed political and economic conditions. This leads to
two insights that will be discussed in the next section: the absence of a thirdgeneration neo-corporatist system to govern the EU economy; and the need
to study and compare different policy areas when it comes to the issue of a
potential fourth-generation corporatism (corporatist policy communities) at
the EU level. Then the co-evolution of the political and the interest group
regime in one policy area will be outlined, to show that corporatist variants
of policy networks are not alien to the EU. The conclusions therefore suggest
that a current version of corporatism can indeed be found even at the EU
level, and that it still seems useful to have such an ideal type to hand as a
contrast to more pluralist or even statist patterns. It must be emphasized,
however, that the overall political significance of such policy-specific
phenomena cannot be compared with that of the third-generation macrocorporatism of the 1970s.4
223
224
EURO-CORPORATISM? NO AGREEMENT ON THE

EXISTENCE AND NATURE OF THE BEAST
The most famous treatise on the issue of EU corporatism was co-authored by
Philippe C. Schmitter and Wolfgang Streeck. Under the telling title, From
national corporatism to transnational pluralism they analysed why the EU
falls short of centralized labourindustrystate relations that would govern
economic policy decisions across specific policy areas. Streeck and Schmitter
concluded that
the evolutionary alternative to neo-liberalism as a model for the European political
economy is clearly not . . . neo-corporatism. More likely to be seen is an Americanstyle pattern of disjointed pluralism or competitive federalism, organized over no
less than three levels regions, nation-states, and Brussels, and characterized by
a profound absence of hierarchy and monopoly among a wide variety of players of
different but uncertain status. (1991, p. 227)
Many authors arrived at similar conclusions. In the broader

Europeanization debate, however, others have used different labels to characterize EU governance. Schmidt talks about statist pluralism in EU policy
formulation (1997, p. 138). Kohler-Kochs ideal-typical EU-style is network
governance, characterized by cooperation (instead of competition) between
all the interested actors and by joint learning processes (1996a). According to
her, hierarchy and subordination give way to an interchange on a more equal
footing, aimed at joint problem-solving, which will furthermore dissipate in
the multi-level system (Kohler-Koch 1999, p. 32). This suggests a much more
cooperative process than self-interested lobbying on the part of many individual private groups according to the pluralist, non-corporatist ideal type5.
On closer inspection, it seems that existing accounts of EU policy styles
(about which see Richardson et al. 1982) are not necessarily contradictory. It
all depends on the definition of corporatism and on the level of analysis.
Including the meso level of specific policy areas, one finds a variety of types
of governance coexisting at the EU level. Therefore, we need to briefly clarify here (a) the concept of corporatism applied in this chapter, and (b) to which
level it can be applied most usefully in the case of the EU.
On the basis of work by Schmitter and Lehmbruch (for the details of which
see Wolfgang Streecks chapter in this book), a corporatist policy-making
process has been described as
a mode of policy formation in which formally designated interest associations are
incorporated within the process of authoritative decision-making and implementation. As such they are officially recognised by the state not merely as interest intermediaries but as co-responsible partners in governance and social guidance.
(Schmitter 1981, p. 295)
Collective participation in the European Union
Dimensions
Structural
Tripartite
Procedural
Bipartite
Policy
(i.e. Keynesianism)
Private interest
Government
225
Systemic (state)
Macro
Highest group level
Levels
Meso
Policy-specific
Sectoral
Regional (sub-state)
Micro
(enterprise)
Figure 9.1 Dimensions and levels of corporatism found in the literature

Unfortunately, however, various authors attributed and added multiple
features and prefixes to corporatism over time, and matters of definition were
confused with empirical features of specific examples of corporatism (Figure
9.1). Corporatism has been defined as an ideology, a variant of political
culture, a type of state, a form of economy, or even as a kind of society
(Schmitter 1996c, p. 3).
Faced with this conceptual stretching, which has led to much confusion, it
seems useful to stick with the narrower, two-dimensional concept as formulated by Schmitter and Lehmbruch, which combines only structural and procedural aspects. Any other facets with regard to further dimensions, or levels,6
can be discussed with the relevant empirical examples to hand. They should
not be part of the definition itself.
Most importantly, it seems that no specific policy (for example,
Keynesianism) should be linked as a matter of definition to the formal properties of corporatist decision-making by privileged interest groups and in a coresponsible style. Otherwise, the concept of corporatism would no longer
wield much practical clout if such a dimension were included. There are also
good reasons in principle to separate the characteristics of a system of policymaking from the characteristics of its output. In terms of the EU and corporatism debate, this is quite an important decision. It implies that the apparent
lack of Keynesian demand-side economic policy does not necessarily make a
226
political (sub-) system not-corporatist. The implication is that the question of

corporatism at the EU level might remain worth discussing.
Further confusion has occurred regarding the levels of corporatism. Both
Schmitters and Lehmbruchs original ideal types had referred to the macro
level, that is to entire political systems. Over time, however, changes at the
economic and the political level have made it even more improbable that,
within otherwise increasingly fragmented political systems, corporatism
should still cover all the crucial issues of policy-making as Lehmbruchs ideal
type assumed (1985, p. 94). Today sectoral economies are becoming increasingly internationalized. This represents yet another major challenge to corporatist regimes at the system level (Hollingsworth and Streeck 1994, p. 289). It
may therefore be useful to distinguish between systemic and more fragmented
types of corporatist publicprivate relations, perhaps in terms of different
ideal-typical generations. While they share a basic corporatist pattern that
corresponds in structural and procedural respects, both their scope and their
framework conditions differ. As a consequence their immediate output and
their wider effects cannot be expected to be identical either.
Compared with the 1970s corporatism (which typically was macro-corporatism with demand-side intervention in the economy), contemporary corporatist arrangements now seem more restricted in functional scope since the
policy-making process is typically broken down and varies between policy
subsystems (Atkinson and Coleman 1989, p. 157) (Table 9.1). Schmitter
(2001, p. 6) confirms this in a recent piece: Modern democracy should be
conceptualized, not as a single regime, but as a composite of partial
regimes (see also Schmitter 1989, p. 71) .
Since the policy networks approach was developed explicitly to capture
sectoral constellations that emerged in response to growing dispersion among
public and private actors of the resources and capacities available for political
action (Kenis and Schneider 1991, p. 28), one may conceptualize a corporatist
type of policy network as a subgroup of policy communities (Figure 9.2).
The connection to the policy networks debate at the policy-specific meso
level of political systems makes the debates on corporatism and European
integration more easily compatible. After all, the EU is a prime example of a
sectoralized polity. Corporatism should therefore be more practicable in the
shape of corporatist policy communities than as a pattern encompassing the
entire EU regime. On the basis of this conceptualization of corporatism as
two-dimensional and of different generations of corporatism, two insights (to
be discussed in the remainder of this chapter) seem apparent: the absence of a
third-generation neo-corporatist system that might govern the EUs economy;
and the need to study and compare different policy areas when it comes to the
issue of fourth-generation corporatism at the EU level, that is potential corporatist policy networks. It must not be forgotten, however, that the impact of
Table 9.1 Genealogy of corporatisms in Europe
227
Scope
Main period
Political system
Markets
Economic policy
doctrine
Traditional
corporatism
Second generation:
authoritarian
corporatism
Third generation:
neo-corporatism
(liberal)
Profession
Middle Ages
Feudal
State
1920s and 1930s
Authoritarian
tatism
Local,
pre-industrial
Closed
Management by
closed guilds
Dirigisme
State
Post-WWII but
pre-internal
market
Western
democratic
Predominantly
nationallyoriented
Fourth generation:
corporatist
policy communities
Policy
Post-1992
Fragmented and
multi-level
Internationalized
Keynesianism
(growth +
employmentoriented)
Neo-liberalism
(competitivenessoriented)
Source:
Adapted from Falkner (1998, p. 38).
228

Policy networks
Open and fluent
Closed and stable

+ Delegation of
authority and
privileging of a few
groups by an active
state
Issue network
Source:
Policy community
Corporatist policy
community
Adapted from Falkner (1998, p. 48).
Figure 9.2
Policy network ideal types
such fourth-generation corporatism is by no means identical to that of former

generations (and, quite clearly, not to that of Keynesian central steering of
entire national economies; see the concluding section).
EURO-CORPORATISM: THE FAILURE OF A THIRDGENERATION TYPE

Vague concepts of the EU (or its predecessors) as of tripartite polity have
existed as long as European integration itself.
Early on, an Economic and Social Committee (ECOSOC) was created
which included nationally appointed representatives of employers, workers
and various other interests. It had (and still has) a consultative function, delivering non-binding reasoned opinions on policy proposals. However, the
ECOSOC has not always worked so satisfactorily (about which see, for example, Streeck and Schmitter 1991, pp. 202ff). The ideological split between its
three parties made it impossible, in many cases, for the committee to reach
common views. In practice, the results of its cumbersome decision-making
processes lacked coherence and definitive status.
Widening the actor constellation therefore seemed a promising approach to
the European Commission, when an economic and monetary union was
discussed for the first time in the late 1960s. The conclusions of the 1970
Werner report suggested that management and labour should be consulted
before Community policies were developed. To prevent excessive disparities,
the development of incomes in the member states should be discussed at the
Community level, with the participation of the social partners (Rifflet 1989,
229
p. 3). The Commissions proposal to the Council on the establishment of

economic and monetary union (COM[70] 1250) insisted on the importance of
concertation of economic policy with the social partners.
While the early efforts of monetary union failed, the calls for an intensification of social partnership continued. In 1970, the standing committee on
employment was established by a Council decision. It consisted of the national
social and labour ministers, representatives of national employers and
employees federations, and representatives of Directorate General V of the
Commission. It issued opinions and was consulted by the Commission on
employment-related topics. But, again, the process proved too cumbersome to
be effective (see Lodge and Herman 1980, p. 284; Streeck and Schmitter 1991,
pp. 202ff).
Still, pressures for tripartite decision-making grew. At the Paris summit in
1972, the heads of state and government considered increased participation of
the social partners to be indispensable on the way towards economic and
monetary union. In the 1974 Social Action Programme (OJ 74/C 13/1), the
Council cited increased participation of the social partners in the economic
and social policy decisions of the Community as one of the central goals (in
addition to full employment and the improvement of living and working
conditions). In general, all measures proposed under the Action Programme
should take into consideration the wishes of the social partners. To make this
possible, the Council envisaged deeper involvement of the standing committee on employment in all matters of employment policy. It also supported
employee organizations that participated in the activity of the Community by
establishing a European Trade Union Institute (ETUI) together with training
and information units for European matters. This was an important signal to
the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), which had been founded
only in 1973. The Council also planned to facilitate, on the basis of the circumstances in the single member states, the conclusion of European collective
wage agreements. This pledge, made as early as 1974, shows that invitations
to the social partners to conclude European-level agreements have a long
history.
In the aftermath of the 1974 Social Action Programme, a new tripartite
discussion forum was established consisting of the Council, the Commission,
and representatives of labour and business. Euro-level representatives were for
the first time invited to participate, along with national social partners. These
tripartite conferences met six times up to 1978, debating issues such as full
employment, inflation and fiscal policy. At this point, the ETUC withdrew
because of the unwillingness of the employers side to conclude agreements
(Gorges 1996, p. 130). By then, employers did not have to fear negative consequences because the Euro-level organization of trade unions was only in its
infancy and incapable of significant collective action. Furthermore, the
230
Councils social policy impetus of the early 1970s had already stalled, and
many important legislative projects remained blocked.
There is no place here to mention all the other tripartite initiatives which
are of a purely consultative kind, such as the meetings that take place before
each European Council meeting and during enlargement negotiations.
Obviously the manifold efforts to bring about some sort of Euro-corporatism
at the systemic level failed anyway, and the hopes that social-democratic
parties and trade unions may have had did not come true.
However, this is not the end of the story because the Delors Commission
undertook in the 1990s to promote a fourth-generation corporatism in the form
of a corporatist policy community in EU social policy.
FOURTH-GENERATION EURO-CORPORATISM:
THE CASE OF SOCIAL POLICY
The fact that the EUs policy-making process is highly fragmented and
dispersed7 makes the question of there being corporatist patterns to the latest
fourth generation highly relevant. Schmitter himself recognized the possible
development of islands of Euro-corporatism in specific sectors or around
distinctive territorial arrangements such as the Euro-regios (Traxler and
Schmitter 1995, p. 201). Indeed, it has been suggested that research should
conceptualize the EU as a plurality of sector-specific constellations rather than
as a unitary macrosystem (see Cawson 1992; Greenwood et al. 1992a, pp. 239,
248).
An important proposition in this context was to study the possibility of a coevolution of political regimes and interest politics (Eichener and Voelzkow
1994a, pp. 17f) and its implications for the development of a more cooperative,
maybe even corporatist policy style. This involves a theoretical argument about
the birth of corporatism. It is a chicken and egg problem that has not been
clearly settled in the literature on corporatism. Frequently, authors seem to
assume that only on the basis of an appropriate structure of interest groups
(singular, compulsory, non-competitive, hierarchically ordered, functionally
differentiated, recognized or licensed by the state and granted a representational
monopoly within their respective categories) can corporatist concertation
occur. At times, however, it has been recognized that corporatism has even
appeared in countries without a corresponding landscape of private interests
(Schmitter 1997, p. 291). In the European integration literature it had been
argued since the early days of the integration process that contrary to the expectations of neo-functionalists, private organizations have not taken the lead but
rather followed political initiatives (Eising and Kohler-Koch 1994, p. 178;
Kohler-Koch 1995, p. 16; 1996b; Platzer 1997, p. 178). Major constitutional
231
innovations such as the Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty on
Economic and Monetary Union have prompted corresponding developments
of interest group organization and interest group involvement in public policymaking alongside relevant new regimes. Thus with the indispensable backing
from the state, and the necessary contribution of public power (Streeck and
Schmitter 1991), fourth-generation corporatism could be expected to result in
specific policy areas.
For the field of social policy, an in-depth study has revealed how such a coevolution took place during the 1990s, in the wake of the Maastricht Treaty
(Falkner 1998). EC social policy-making is today characterized by a coexistence and entanglement of governmental negotiations and collective bargaining. In fact, the EC Treaty provisions for social affairs drafted under the
leadership of Commission President Jacques Delors, and adopted at
Maastricht in December 1991 give primacy to agreements between management and labour over traditional Council Directives (Keller and Srries 1998).
Euro-level interest groups may, on the occasion of obligatory consultation by
the Commission on social policy measures, inform the Commission of their
wish to initiate negotiations in order to reach a collective agreement on the
matter under discussion. This brings traditional EC decision-making, which
involves the Commission as initiator, the Council and its working groups as
the decision-makers, and the European Parliament, to a standstill for at least
nine months (Article 137 TEC).8 If a collective agreement is signed, it can, at
the joint request of the signatories, be incorporated in a Council decision, on
a proposal from the Commission (Article 138 TEC).
Since Maastricht, the social partners have thus become formal participants
in social policy legislation. In fact, the EUs social policy procedures fit the
classic formula for corporatist concertation, that is a mode of policy formation in which formally designated interest associations are incorporated within
the process of authoritative decision-making and implementation (Schmitter
1981, p. 295). Since this specific style of publicprivate cooperation is
restricted to one policy area only, it seems preferable not to speak of Eurocorporatism (Gorges 1996) but rather of a corporatist policy community
(Falkner 1998).
A number of cross-sectoral collective agreements have resulted from this
tripartite arrangement.9 The first application of the new procedure saw no
formal negotiations but only talks on talks (Gold and Hall 1994, p. 181) on
a collective agreement between the two sides of industry. This eventually led
to a traditional Council Directive on European works councils.10 It was
already a major breakthrough, however, that on that occasion, in autumn 1993,
UNICE declared that it was ready to sit down with the Commission and/or the
European unions to develop a . . . procedure for information and consultation
that is acceptable to all parties (EIRR 238, p. 13). Until then it had always
232
strictly rejected any European-level initiative on employee information and

participation in the enterprise.
The second decision-making process under the new social policy regime
did lead to agreement among the three major federations. On 14 December
1995, the ETUC, UNICE and CEEP adopted a framework agreement on
parental leave,11 providing an individual right to a minimum of three months
time off while employment rights were maintained. Through a Council
Directive, the agreement was made binding on the member states (initially
with the exception of the UK, but since the Labour government has now
signed up to the social agreement, all relevant Directives have been extended
to the UK).12 Further collective negotiations concerned atypical work and led
to a second European-level agreement, on part-time work, in the summer of
1997. This was followed by an agreement on fixed-term employment and,
most recently, a voluntary agreement13 on telework (EIRR August 2002).
Among the issues on which no agreement was reached by the social partners (most importantly, the reversal of the burden of proof in sex discrimination cases, sexual harassment at work and information and consultation of
workers in national enterprises), only the latter issue was controversial since a
minority of UNICE members refused to negotiate.14 The other issues were
generally perceived not to represent appropriate issues for collective negotiations since these are usually a matter of state legislation even at the national
level (on the recent trend towards non-binding agreements, see this chapters
conclusions).
Replacing what is the state at the national level, there are two European
institutions involved in corporatist policy-making under the Social
Agreement. The Commission has significant influence without directly
participating in the negotiations because it supplies the social partners with a
document that constitutes the basis of their talks. Although the Commission
is not formally represented at the bargaining table, it happened that the secretary to the neutral umpire chairing the negotiations was a Commission official. Furthermore, the Council may only implement a collective agreement on
a proposal by the Commission. Thus, the Commissions power of initiative is
preserved and extended to the corporatist procedure. In addition, the Council
is involved in some corporatist exchange as well not only at the stage of
implementing an agreement but also during the decision-making process.
Only if a necessary majority of Council members seems willing to adopt
social legislation will UNICE normally be interested in negotiations among
the social partners, which it views as a lesser evil. The Council, in turn, had
by the early 1990s an interest in successful social partner negotiations in
order to legitimate both European-level activities and (what was in the past at
least as important) European-level non-decisions in the face of a public which
was increasingly critical about the lack of a social dimension to European
233
integration. Despite the fact that negotiations, in the narrow sense, were
conducted solely among the social partners, the cooperative policy-making
style under the Social Agreement hence had features quite similar to tripartism between the state, capital and labour at the national level.
Since the ideal-typical description of procedural corporatism as developed
by Lehmbruch and Schmitter fits the innovative decision patterns under the
Maastricht Social Agreement rather well, it is of interest if there are corresponding developments in the relevant system of interest groups, that is, in the
structural dimension of the definition of a corporatist policy network. In fact,
relevant changes affect reforms within groups towards more competences and
decision capacity and the formation of a core group of interest associations,
indicating a move towards monopolistic representation in social partner negotiations. These developments are even more significant if one considers that,
prior to the Maastricht Social Agreement, the participation of European-level
associations in binding negotiations with each other and the EC institutions
was by no means undisputed in their member organizations, on both the union
and the employer side.
The ETUC was the first to adapt its structure with a view to enhancing its
negotiating capacity at the European level. In 1991, the internal structure and
decision-making process were reformed to limit the possibility of deadlock,
and the European industry committees were allowed to vote.15 This may be
regarded as progress compared to the prior problem of coordinating territorial
and functional interests which are now both directly represented under the
umbrella of the ETUC. Further amendments to the ETUC constitution were
adopted at its May 1995 congress. The executive committee now has the duty
to determine the composition and mandate of the delegation for negotiations
with European employers organisations and to ensure the convergence at
European level of the demands and contractual policies of affiliated organisations (Article 11). It is also a significant development, unthinkable until a few
years ago, that the ETUC may now adopt binding agreements even against the
will of several influential members (examples are the Parental Leave
Agreement and the Part-Time Work Agreement). In the part-time case, six
votes out of 33 were against the deal: by two German unions (Deutscher
Gewerkschaftsbund, DGB, and Deutsche Angestelltengewerkschaft, DAG),
the French Force Ouvrire, the Christian-Democratic Luxembourg union
(LCGB) and the European industry federations of railway and construction
workers (according to an interview with an ETUC official, July 1997). Various
other industry committees abstained. This may be seen as an indicator of the
de-facto supranationalization of the ETUC, an organization that was for a long
time not able to afford to antagonize its larger member organizations
(Ebbinghaus and Visser 1997, p. 9).
Similarly, a change in UNICEs statute in June 1992 aimed directly at
234
meeting the challenges of the Social Protocol. UNICE was formally assigned
the task of representing its members in the dialogue between the social partners provided for in the Social Agreement (article 2.1 of the statute). The
Council of Presidents was put in charge of defining the positions to be taken
in the social dialogue. When UNICE failed to overcome the rejection of the
attempted compromise on European works councils by its British member, the
CBI, the action prompted further constitutional reform to cope with the British
opt-out of the Maastricht Social Agreement. An internal compromise was
reached in April 1994, according to which the CBI participated in the negotiations, but had neither a veto right nor was bound by an agreement of which
it did not approve. The rule that collective agreements have still to be adopted
unanimously was challenged after the failure of the fixed-term work negotiations, but so far without effect. The fact that the federation of enterprises with
public participation (CEEP), the smaller partner on the employer side, adapted
its rules of procedure to the Social Agreement is less surprising since it was
traditionally more open to EU-level negotiations with labour than UNICE.16
But what about the plethora of lobbies and the close contacts with individual firms that are sometimes expected to hinder effective corporatist negotiations at the European level? Notwithstanding the persistence of these
characteristic features of EU governance in general, EU institutions actively
prompted more encompassing and quasi-monopolistic patterns of interest
representation in the social policy field and for the collective negotiations
under the Maastricht Treaty. Both Council and Commission have supported
the monopolization of pacts under the Social Agreement by the three major
cross-sectoral interest federations (ETUC, CEEP and UNICE). This may be
compared with the licensing (Schmitter) in corporatist national systems, even
though it mostly relies on incentives for self-organization. In its
Communication on the Application of the Social Agreement (COM(93) 600
final, 14 December 1993; paragraph 22ff.), the Commission defined a set of
criteria for organizations to be included in consultations on legislative proposals under the Social Agreement. Almost 30 associations may, during the
process of consultation, theoretically decide to negotiate on a collective agreement. However, the Commission believed that it is up to the organizations
themselves to develop their own dialogue and negotiating structure (see ibid,
paragraph 26). A formalized narrow definition of the social partners under
the Social Agreement might have been challenged in, and finally reversed by,
the European Court of Justice. That de facto there are only three negotiating
Euro-groups was nevertheless clearly supported by the Commission when it
suspended several legislative projects on the joint request of the big three,
although it had received responses from many more organizations during the
consultations (see, for example, EIRR 260, p. 3). Subsequently, the Council
implemented the collective agreements that were signed by the same three
235
peak federations. In the parental leave case, it explicitly welcomed the fact that
for the first time it had been possible to reach an agreement with the social
partners on a draft Directive (European Council declaration 1995, point 6).
On both sides of industry, smaller interest groups17 protested in vain against
the three major federations de facto monopoly on negotiating as crosssectoral social partners under the Social Agreement. The European association
of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (UEAPME) even filed an unsuccessful lawsuit against the Council.18 The Commission was eager to find a way to
satisfy these groups so as not to endanger the legitimacy of the new corporatist
decision mode, for example, by encouraging the small associations to link up
with the major groups. Since then, several Euro-groups on the employer side
were included in the social partner negotiations on an observer basis.
UEAPME concluded a cooperation agreement with UNICE envisaging
consultations before UNICE represents employer positions in the social
dialogue, but it does not have a veto right. Thus, while the representativeness
and public acceptance of the negotiation procedure seem improved, the greater
decision-making capacity associated with the exclusive participation of only
three associations has been upheld.
Not all the elements of Schmitters 1974 elaborate ideal-type description of
a corporatist interest group system are present in the corporatist policy
community with regard to European social policy. However, in essence a
structurally corporatist pattern as set out in the two-dimensional SchmitterLehmbruch definition is present. Only a few groups, which are not competing
with each other for membership, negotiate. They have proved capable of striking deals and were acknowledged by the state (that is the Commission and
the Council) as legitimate representatives of labour and industry at the EU
level.
CONCLUSIONS
This chapters main argument is that an encapsulated tripartism (an expression suggested by the editors of this volume) exists in the field of EU social
policy: in the form of a corporatist policy network. At the same time, corporatist patterns have never been successful as a mode of steering the EU in
overall terms. While third-generation corporatism is lacking, fourth-generation corporatist patterns do exist (see Table 9.1). That EU-level corporatism
seems to have skipped a generation may have to do with the later establishment of its political system if compared with the nation state and with the
changed economic conditions. It may also have to do with the often complementary character of the supranational EU system in relation to domestic
systems. As national governments were often reluctant to transfer sovereignty
236
to the supranational level, so too were interest group leaders. In both cases,
this has not fully prevented integration, but progress has been slow and incremental at best. The EU, in particular the European Commission, has at times
made a deliberate point of promoting a tripartite mode of governance. At the
same time, in many other instances, the Commission made active use of the
much greater discretion allowed by decision-making without veto power for
organized groups, in particular on the issues of liberalization.
Returning to the meso-level of policy areas, there are several examples of
corporatist cooperation, although this is certainly not the most frequently practised policy style. However, it must be noted that recently state backing for the
corporatist policy community in the field of social policy seems to have faded.
As mentioned, the latest agreement on telework was only a voluntary one, and
there has not been a binding agreement for a number of years. Instead, ETUC,
UNICE and CEEP recently announced that a work programme for an
autonomous social dialogue on predominantly non-regulative issues, would
be implemented through their own national procedures. It seems that the
momentum with regard to binding agreements to replace formal Council
Directives in the social policy field is for the time being lost.
A number of factors explain the current difficulties. First, the shadow of the
law is now less visible than when the first agreements were negotiated. There
are no Commission proposals anymore that are discussed in the Council
before they are appropriated by the social partners. In the years immediately
after the Maastricht Treaty ETUC, UNICE and CEEP grasped the opportunity
to take over longstanding legislative projects that had been blocked in the
Council. Second, the European Commission has recently favoured the method
of open coordination, which now enjoys considerable public and media
attention. Third, the additional legitimacy potentially conferred upon a political system by the social partners seems to be less urgently needed at the time
of writing, as compared to the post-Maastricht era, once the framework for
economic and monetary union had been established. Meanwhile, the main
focus of attention has shifted to the Convention drafting a Constitution for
Europe; the ensuing intergovernmental conference and on the enlargement of
the EU in 2004. The latter certainly represents a major challenge, not only for
the EU itself, but also for its organized interests. Not only will finding agreement be even more difficult in an EU of 25. Additionally, even more diverse
social conditions, labour law standards and social dialogue traditions will
make meaningful agreements anything but easier.
In more general terms still, the example of EU social policy after
Maastricht suggests that a fourth-generation corporatism in specific policy
sectors may indeed develop in a process of co-evolution of political regime
and organized interests. In this respect, crucial dynamics are similar to those
operating at the national level. However, this needs to be put into perspective.
237
Corporatist policy communities represent only one mode of governance

among many within the contemporary EU system. One may even argue that
EU corporatism has moved from high-stake to low-stake political arenas (as
referred to by the editors of this volume). Furthermore, at the EU level corporatist decision-making in the social policy field seems even less stable than
domestic corporatism. Further research is needed to establish if the declining
significance of corporatist patterns in EU social policy is mirrored in other
EU policy areas. The fact that continuous long-term stable corporatist cooperation has failed to emerge in EU policy-making conforms to recent national
experience. Indeed, the most likely pattern for the forseeable future may be
cyclical, rather than linear (Schmitter 1996c; see also Schmitter 1989;
Schmitter and Grote 1997). Generally the tides of corporatism seem to relate
to changing need for consensus, as perceived by political leaders. It seems
that many governments have recently opted for more innovation at the price
of less social peace. Perhaps scholars interested in corporatism should pay
more attention to the political conditions of corporatist cooperation, as
opposed or in addition to the economic ones and as opposed to the structure
of interest groups.
Two final insights arise from the EU and corporatism debate. First, the
debate on Euro-corporatism confirms what Schmitter (1997, p. 287) and
Lehmbruch (1996, p. 735) pointed out from the start, that corporatism is not a
theory. Still, corporatism is a very useful concept and it would be unthinkable
today not to refer to it. Without any doubt, it was a crucial typological innovation to go beyond the pluralist image of competing pressure groups and of
the state as a unilateral policy-maker. This is regardless of the fact that empirically corporatist patterns have shifted from the systemic level to that of
specific policy networks.
Second, the political clout of corporatist policy communities cannot equate
to ideal-typical 1970s neo-corporatism. It still seems useful to have such an
ideal type, as a contrast to more pluralist or statist patterns, but it must be
emphasized that the overall political significance of policy-specific fourthgeneration corporatism cannot be compared with that of earlier generations.
The more restricted in scope and the less stable corporatism becomes, the less
possible it seems that the private interests involved should be in a position to
establish a genuine centre of political power in opposition to the state and to
make their contribution to the shaping of public policies truly significant.
More generally, the notion of generations of corporatism could be of interest for broader-based theory. New institutionalist writers have recently studied
the evolution of institutional arrangements (Pierson 2000a, 2000b). If we similarly regard corporatism as an institution in the wider sense, it appears that the
concept of layering as suggested by Thelen (2003) may be a suitable heuristic tool to capture the gradual shrinking of an institution. In our case, we have
238
seen how corporatism attenuated over time in both functional scope and political significance.
NOTES
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
Most recently, see (Schmitter 2003, 1996a, 1996b). Among his classics are (Schmitter 1969;
1970). In this volume, see Hooghe and Marks.
See, in particular, his innovative proposals for improving the status quo via semi-public
interest associations funded via citizen vouchers (Schmitter 1994, 1992) and a distributive
Euro-Stipendium (Schmitter and Bauer 2001). In this volume, see Crouch, della Porta, Offe
and Preuss, and ODonnell.
See, for example, (Schmitter and Torreblanca 2001). In this volume, see Bruszt and Karl.
This chapter assembles and extends arguments I have presented in different earlier writings
(for example, Falkner 1998, 1999, 2001, 2003a, 2003b; Falkner et al. 2005).
However, it needs to be mentioned that authors in the European integration sub-field of
political science do not necessarily refer to the same thing when talking about corporatism
(for the classic conceptualization by Schmitter and Lehmbruch, see below.) Schmidt defines
corporatism as a situation where interests have privileged access to both decision-making
and implementation (Schmidt 1996, 1997). Kohler-Koch describes corporatism at the macro
level of political systems as the pursuit of a common interest and the search for consensus
instead of majority voting (Kohler-Koch 1999, pp. 26ff).
The label of meso-corporatism is not of help here, for it was never applied in a uniform
manner. It was (and is) used by different authors to refer either to economic sectors (for
example, the dairy industry), to cross-sectoral policy areas (for example, environmental
policy), to the regional or local level, or even to distinguish between different levels of interest organization.
See also Streeck and Schmitter 1991: p. 208; Eising and Kohler-Koch 1994; Greenwood et
al. 1992b; Mazey and Richardson 1993; Pedler and Schendelen 1994; Eichener and
Voelzkow 1994b; Greenwood 1995; Wallace and Young 1997; Kohler-Koch and Eising
1999.
The Commission and the social partners may jointly decide to extend this period.
There have also been a number of developments at the sectoral level (Keller and Srries
1999; Keller and Bansbach 2000).
For details, see Falkner 1998, pp. 97113.
For details, see Falkner 1998, pp. 114128.
This procedure provided a solution to what had been perceived as a major obstacle to the
development of corporatist patterns at the European level (Keller 1995; Obradovich 1995),
that is that CEEP, the ETUC and UNICE lack the powers to implement their agreements
directly via their member organizations.
To be implemented, not via a Council Directive, but by the interest groups themselves.
This led to pressures for further reform of the voting procedures in UNICE (about which see
below).
Except in financial and statutory matters (Ebbinghaus and Visser 1994, p. 239; Dlvik
1997a, 1997b).
For details, see Falkner 1998, pp. 159f.
These are mainly UEAPME (representing small and medium-sized enterprises) and
EuroCommerce (representing firms in retail, wholesale and international trade) on the
employers side, and CESI (representing independent trade unions) and CEC (representing
professional and managerial staff) on the side of workers.
The argument that the signatory parties to the parental leave agreement were not representative was rejected by the European Court of Justice (case T-135/96 decided 17 June
1998).
239
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& Society, 19 (2), 13365, also published in Wolfgang Streeck (ed.) (1992), Social
Institutions and Economic Performance, London: Sage.
Thelen, Kathleen (2003), How institutions evolve: insights from comparative historical analysis, in James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer (eds), Comparative
Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 20840.
Traxler, Franz and Philippe C. Schmitter (1995), The emerging Euro-polity and organized interests, European Journal of International Relations, 1 (2), 191218.
Wallace, Helen and Alasdair Young (eds) (1997), Participation and Policymaking in
the European Union, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Postscriptum: working with Philippe

Guillermo ODonnell
I met Philippe at Yale, in 1969. By then he had already published on Latin
American integration, a remarkably anticipatory work of the integration
efforts that are nowadays taking place in this region, and one that introduced
him to a literature that he put to very good use in his work on the European
Union. Furthermore, Philippe had by then finished his doctoral dissertation on
Brazil, which soon after he published in a book which was widely recognized
as one of the best studies of this country ever and in which he first tried his
hand at a concept neo-corporatism that afterwards would generate a mountain of research and discussion.1
The Yale meeting was on Authoritarian Brazil and Philippe was contributing a paper. But his main activity was organizing a network of solidarity
against the harsh repression that the Brazilian bureaucratic-authoritarian
regime had by then unleashed. With his usual energy and altruism Philippe
was extremely effective in this task, bringing to the attention of academia and
the international media the abuses that were being perpetrated in that country.
This earned him the gratitude and respect of many present at that meeting, not
least the Brazilians including future President Fernando Henrique Cardoso and
future Minister of Culture Francisco Weffort, along with this Argentinian, who
could understand the issue very well. In this undertaking Philippe evinced
what he would show again and again: an effective commitment to basic values
of human decency, and the love and respect with which he would treat, and
keep in his heart, the countries he researched on. The many friends that he has
everywhere bear witness to this.
Later on, in 1974, he and I agreed on our first undertaking: the organization
of a seminar on The state and public policies, run jointly with my compatriot
Oscar Oszlak and sponsored by the Social Science Research Council. We ran
this seminar in Buenos Aires at times when violence was rampant between
various guerrilla movements and right-wing paramilitary groups. At the slightest sign of imminent violence the streets were suddenly deserted, and the night
belonged to cars filled with heavily armed thugs. Another of Philippes characteristics is his insatiable will to learn everything about the people of the
countries he visits. This led him to ask questions in the streets, in cafs and in
restaurants, to individuals he approached with his broad smile and upbeat
243
244
mood, in ways and circumstances that we natives dared not risk. (In this,
Philippe was obviously helped by the fact that often he would be eating enormous watercress salads while informing everyone who cared to listen that it
was the best watercress in the world.) During the seminar the students, as well
as Oszlak and myself, were equally amazed by what was going on in
Argentina and by the veritable explosion of ideas that Philippe put to us.
Then, in 1976, came the coup in Argentina. It inaugurated a terrorist state,
with thousands of persons disappeared or directly murdered. In mid-1975,
already seeing the coup coming, some Argentinian scholars had created a
small think tank, CEDES, which we hoped could survive as a space of intellectual freedom in the midst of those horrors. Our hopes depended to a significant extent on having an international umbrella of academics and
institutions whose solidarity would raise the perceived costs of annihilating us.
The Ford Foundation, the Swedish Agency of Development, the Woodrow
Wilson International Center for International Scholars, and several individuals, Philippe of course included, generously agreed to provide us with that
umbrella. We managed to survive, although several members of CEDES had
to leave the country in a hurry. I myself, tired of such an ambience, left for
Brazil in 1978, believing hopefully, but wrongly, that this was for a short time.
Shortly thereafter, the Wilson Center made a felicitous decision: appointing
Abe Lowenthal secretary of its Latin American Program. He established an
advisory council chaired by Albert Hirschman and including among its
members Cardoso, Philippe and myself. With a wink from Abe, the three of us
soon began to develop what we called a conspiration. This we could do both
because of the trust among us that had developed through solidarity during the
misadventures of Brazil and Argentina (and by then also Chile and Uruguay)
and because we felt that our work had important communalities in terms of the
topics we approached and the concerns it expressed.
So we proposed to the Wilson Center a project that would study transitions
from authoritarian rule, a topic to which the very recent, and by then uncertain, transitions in Spain and Portugal (a country that Philippe had also been
studying) gave encouragement. This proposal was strongly supported by the
Academic Council, with Abe and Hirschman taking a leading role in making
it feasible. Yet the project encountered strong resistance within the Wilson
Center and, more broadly, in Washington, DC. These opponents argued that
the idea was no more than the wishful thinking of marginalized Latin
American intellectuals supported by some US radicals (that is, mostly
Philippe), at times when the political climate in that city favoured a benevolent view of the repressive regimes of its Southern neighbours. Abe showed
skill in overcoming these obstacles, coining along the way the felicitous turn
of phrase that this project was not the result of wishful thinking but an expression of thoughtful wishing.
Postscriptum
245
So the project was launched. Shortly afterwards we received the bad

news bad only for us, of course that Cardoso had become a national
senator. Faced with the challenge of replacing him as co-coordinator of the
project, Abe had an excellent idea: after consultation with Philippe and
me, Laurence Whitehead was appointed to the role. So we ran several meetings at the Wilson Center, with prospective chapter authors and several
distinguished scholars (such as Juan Linz, Alessandro Pizzorno and Robert
Dahl) as valuable resource persons. Philippe and I had already written
preliminary pieces which were discussed at those meetings and which hopefully would serve to provide some common focus for the chapters we were
commissioning.
Armed with these pieces, Philippe and I got together in 1983, at the Kellogg
Institute for International Studies of the University of Notre Dame, of which I
had been appointed academic director. These were the first years of computer
word processing. Philippe put himself to work on my text, using a computer
that the Institute had just proudly bought and loaded with the prehistoric
Wordstar program. After several days of work, the file mysteriously disappeared and all efforts to recover it failed. It was then that Philippe, whose
mood had not been helped by his low opinion of the quality of life in South
Bend, had a tantrum that is still remembered with awe by the oldtimers of the
Kellogg Institute. Eventually somebody recovered the file for the benefit of
scholarship and the survival of the institute.
It was then that the drafts of the chapters that would be part of the four
volumes of Transitions from Authoritarian Rule started to arrive. Laurence,
Philippe and I had a big task ahead, revising, commenting and editing those
texts, and finalizing our own. So Philippe, who was already in his first tenure
as professor at the Istituto Universitario Europeo, invited us to work for two
weeks in the beautiful villa he had rented. As soon as Laurence and I arrived
it became clear to us that Philippe had fallen irretrievably, passionately in love
with Italy and everything Italian which to my mind leads him to sometimes
exaggerated claims about the supreme quality of Italian wines, cheeses and
vegetables, though he may have a point about pasta and olive oil. It also
became clear that, perhaps as a legacy of the Argentine watercress, Philippe
had perfected to the point of sublime complexity the art of salad making. In
this congenial setting we put ourselves to work. And we got through it all! So
Philippe, as everyone knows, a lover of Macchiavelli, arranged for a superb
dinner at the place where, he claimed, Macchiavelli had lived while exiled
from Florence.
So we joyfully prepared for the great dinner. But I had the bad idea of first
taking a shower and breaking my leg. Instead of Macchiavellis place we
landed in a Florence hospital, where after some inquiries Philippe admitting
that everything was not always perfect in Italys public health system
246
informed me that all the bone surgeons were at a congress in Sicily and would
not return to Florence for three days . . . I spare telling the reader about the
torture that those days were, worsened by the very sad fact that Philippe had
to rush to France because his mother had passed away. Not a good ending to
a project that was wonderful, not just intellectually but also because it
cemented a friendship that continues until today (even though at the time I did
not consider particularly appropriate a remark Philippe made, undoubtedly
with the intention of lifting my mood, to the effect that we Argentines have
such a penchant for dramatic endings to everything!)
The Transitions2 work had a great impact especially, I must say, its
fourth volume, written by Philippe and me, which he called the green book
because of the colour of its cover. Even more than the great satisfaction given
to us by the many discussions and citations that the book (and its translations
into Spanish and Portuguese) provoked in liberalizing and democratizing
countries, we were elated by the news that it was being circulated, photocopied and translated in zamisdat editions in several countries of the Soviet
empire, South Korea, Taiwan, South Africa and elsewhere. Even many years
afterwards, it is a great joy for us to meet people who tell us about reading the
green book while still living under apparently never-ending authoritarian
rule.
Philippe gladly assumed as his own the originally ironic label of transitologist, and later on the even uglier one of consolidologist. So, propelled by
his awesome energy and carrying these labels by his ever renewed and exciting ideas about these topics as well as more recently by the excellent fruits of
his return to international integration, Philippe has been collecting what I
believe is the world record for air miles (among academics, at least). His everincreasing italophilia has not prevented him from becoming a citizen of the
world.
Since our Florence grande finale we have regularly kept in touch,
exchanging ideas and papers (more from Philippes side than mine), agreeing
and disagreeing (especially about consolidology) and sometimes sharing
critical remarks about certain streams of contemporary political science. We
have not reminisced much, however, about the Transitions project except
when the Wilson Center decided to celebrate, in October 2004, the 25th
anniversary of the launching of the project. There, with Laurence and Abe
and a group of distinguished scholars, some of them authors of chapters in
those volumes, we remembered the particular political circumstances that
surrounded the project, commented on how much the world had changed and
wondered how to tackle in future work, of ourselves and especially that of
younger scholars, both these changed circumstances and the knowledge we
and others have gained from what was right and what turned out to be wrong
in those volumes.
Postscriptum
247
NOTES
1.
2.
Philippe C. Schmitter (1971), Interest Conflict and Political Change in Brazil, Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
ODonnell, Guillermo, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead (eds) (1986),
Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, vols 14, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Index
abnormal politics 104
Abromeit, H. 191
aggregate demand 48
Almond, G. 103
American normalism 3
European rejection of 4, 6
Andretta, M. 75
Anner, M. 82
anti-nuclear movements 74
Argentina 125, 140, 141, 143, 144,
244
Aslund, A. 109
associationalism 119, 1278, 12931,
144
associational relationships 13743
associative democracy 31
Atkinson, M. 226
authoritarian rule 114, 115, 1223
Latin America 123
liberalization 101
autocracies 114
autocratic capitalism 159, 167, 169
autocratic state socialism 158, 170
Ayres, J.M. 81
Baccaro, L. 24, 25, 27, 30
Baltic countries 155
Bansbach, M. 238
Bartolini, S. 121, 145, 209
Bastion, S. 113
Bauer, M.W. 238
BDI (Federation of German Industries)
59, 65
Beck, U. 67
Beetham, D. 177, 183, 189
Belgium 61
Bell, D. 3
Bendix, R. 6
Broud, S. 79
Bill Chavez, R. 107
Blaschke, S. 50
Boix, C. 106, 109
Bolivia 124
bourgeoisie 103, 167
Bova, P. 107
Bowman, J. 129
Brand, K.-W. 74
Bratton, M. 107
Brazil 113, 124, 125, 126, 14041
Brewer, M. 213
Brinks, D. 110
Brownlee, J. 102
Bruno, M. 15
Bruszt, L. 109, 151, 154, 155, 157, 162,
168, 169
Bryan, R. 167, 170
Bulgaria 155
Bunce, V. 107, 169, 170
Burgess, K. 126
business associations 20, 21, 32, 65
Calmfors, L. 40
capital intensity 50
capitalism 66, 68
autocratic 159
and democracy 14972
varieties of 356, 37, 39, 68, 157
and welfare state 91
Caporaso, J.A. 212
Cardoso, F.H. 103
Carey, S. 213
Carothers, T. 101, 102
Castells, M. 56, 75
Castles, F.G. 15
Cawson, A. 17, 230
CEEP 232, 234
Central Europe, gini coefficiency 170
Chalmers, D.A. 128
Chile 124, 125, 144, 146
China 163
Christian Democrats 10
citizenship
and democratization 16061
and the EU 199200
249
250
Index
citizenship rights 109, 149, 152, 153,

1556, 162, 1656, 169
civic cultures 103
civil society 101
Latin America 128, 138
class base of democratic politics 657
class conflict 6, 12, 80, 91
class corporatism 30
class politics 5
class relations 323
Cloward, R.A. 77
Coen, D. 31, 65
Cohen, J. 31
coherence, internal 36
Coleman, W.D. 226
collective action
Latin America 12931
nature of demands 1357
organizational differences 131
collective bargaining 5, 12, 13, 52, 55
collective competition goods 30
collective identity 87, 91
within associations 135
collective organization, social groups 10
collectivism 10, 17, 26, 27
organized 30
Collier, D. 121, 122, 130
Collier, R.B. 105, 121, 122, 130, 146
commodity price crisis 49
common index of need 206
Communication on the Application of
the Social Agreement 234
communism 109
comparative politics 6
competitive corporatism 25, 30
complementarity 36
conceptual corruption 39
concertation 73, 767, 85, 90, 92
of economic policy 229
confederatio 191, 217
consolidated democracy 161
consortio 191, 216, 217
constitutive conditions 34
constitutive norms 185
constraining disensus 208
convergence theories 3, 7, 35, 36
Coppedge, M. 110
corporatism xv, 119
bipartite and tripartite 17
class 30
concept of 10, 11, 12, 17

definitions of 225
dimensions and levels in literature
225
and European integration 226
and formal democracy 6062
functional scope 226
genealogy in Europe 227
generations of 2378
and industrial relations 11
levels of 17, 226
measurement of 15
meso-, micro- and macro-corporatism
17
neo-liberal attacks on 21
origins of 230
pre-war 47
societal 47
supply-side 23, 25
as a two dimensional phenomenon
223
corporatist convergence theory 17
corporatist debate 13, 16, 17, 18, 31, 33
corporatist growth industry 1219
corporatist international 14
corporatist policy communities 237
corporatist policy making process 224
corporatist theory 16, 17
decline 28
corruption 61, 109, 155, 157
creativity 78
critical unions 89, 90
cross-regional comparison 106, 108,
109, 110
cross-sectoral coalitions 169
cross-sectoral collective agreements
2312
Crouch, C. 15, 30, 35, 49, 50, 54, 55, 56,
91
Culpepper, P.D. 26
cultural diversity 211
Dahl, R.A. 7, 183
Dahm, G. 201
Dalton, R.J. 208
decline of the people 125
Delhey, J. 189, 198
della Porta, D. 74, 75, 81, 82, 85, 87
Delors Commission 230
demand management 12
Index
democracy
active characteristics of democratic
rule 178
associative 31
and capitalism 14972
definitions 119
in the developing world xiii
and development 169
European Union xvi
formal democracy 627
and corporatism 6062
and lobbies 635
meaning of 1778
and neo-corporatism 4670
procedural minima conception 119,
120
vertical concept 197
weaknesses of political democracy 63
democratic diversity xiv
democratic legitimacy 18590
democratic rule 178
democratic saturation, European Union
176
democratic transition see transition
democratization 99100, 103, 16062
and citizenship 16061
definition of 160
first phase 167
and liberalization 161
and popular interest regime in Latin
America 11948
demos 186, 187
Denmark 211
depoliticization 154
Deutsch, K.W. 198, 199
development, and democracy 169
devices, for regime change 111
Diamond, L.J. 101, 105
Diani, M. 74, 85
dictablanda 161
Diz Medrano, J. 214
diffusion measures 110
Di Palma, G. 104
direct action 74, 85, 87, 89
distributional coalitions 27
Dogan, M. 104, 105
Dlvik, J.E. 238
domestic democracy 177, 181
Doner, R. 167, 170
Dore, R.P. 66
251
Dosh, P. 136
Drake, P. 105
Drifill, J. 40
Dryzek, J.S. 74
Duchee, F. 215
Dunlop, J.T. 6
Durkheim, E. 10
East
compatibility of capitalism and
democracy in 1534
elites in 168
institutional change 154, 157
transitions 169
Eastern Europe, tripartism 40
Ebbinghaus, B. 24, 233, 238
EBRD (European Bank for Research and
Development) 170
economic liberalization 1623
economic and monetary union 229
economic performance 545
Economic and Social Committee
(ECOSOC) 228
economic transformation 158
Ecuador 124
Eichenberg, R.C. 208
Eichener, V. 230
EIRR 231, 232
Eising, R. 230
elections
European Parliament 179
founding elections 103
procedural minimum 161
process 634
role of 100, 1012
turnout 66
elites 168, 208
conflict and competition 113
European Union 175, 208
Elster, J. 113
empires 194
employers 51
employment 46, 55, 61
Latin America 1267
sectoral changes and neo-corporatist
institutions 5560
service sector 57
EMU 180
encapsulated tripartism 235
end of history 153
252
end of ideology 3, 4
environmental organizations 74
equifinality 11112
Erne, R. 51, 52, 63
Ersson, S.O. 66
Etchemendy, S. 143
Etzioni, A. 40
Eurobarometer surveys 188
Eurocorporatism 22342
existence and nature of 2248
failure of third-generation type
22830
fourth generation 23035
Europe
federal schemes for 208, 212, 216,
217
industrial relations 31
rejection of American normalism 4
trade unions 5
worker and student uprisings 5
European Association of Small and
Medium Sized Enterprises
(UEAPME) 235
European Commission 182, 232
European Community 198
European Council 232
European cultural space 188
European Employment Strategy 184
European Governance (White Paper)
182
European identification 1878, 189
European integration 1867, 1889,
19091, 20812, 23031
and corporatism 226
and national identity 21215, 217
public support 208
scope and level of 210
European Parliament 179, 199, 231
European polity, legitimacy 175204
European Social Forum 76, 81
participation of activists 84, 86
trust of activists in institutions 88
European social model (ESM) 188
European Trade Union Confederation
(ETUC) 229, 232, 233
European Trade Union Institute (ETUI)
229
European Union 2, 31, 52
additional regulations for new
members 165
Index
citizens of 199200
collective participation in 22342
condominio 191, 208, 216, 217
confederatio 191, 217
consortio 191, 216, 217
corporatisms in 227
democratic deficit 175, 176, 177
democratic saturation view 176
domestic democracy 177, 181, 1834
elites 175
employment and social security
policy 190
foreign policy 18990
governance 1812
institutional policies 213
left/right positioning on economic
policies 20912
legislation 1812
links with unions and trade
associations 61
members loss of political autonomy
18085
mutual responsiveness 199
opaque style of legislation 183
output legitimacy 181
policy making process 230
policy styles 224
politicization in 208
post-national collective agency
199
presentist legitimacy 182, 184
as a Republican Empire 1935
rule making 180
secondary law 188
stato/federato 191, 216
subsidies 188, 198
technocratic view 1756
tripartite polity 228
unfeasibility/undesirability argument
1767
Euro-scepticism 214, 215
Evans, G. 209
Evans, P. 81, 167
exchange rate 21
externalization 206, 215
Eyal, G. 168
Fajertag, G. 24
Faletto, E. 103
Falkner, G. 212, 228, 231
Index
Fantasia, R. 92
fascism 47, 48, 58
Faust 12
federalism 224
federal schemes, for Europe 208, 212,
216, 217
female employees, and trade unions 57
Finegold, D. 50
Fish, S. 109, 170
Flanagan, S.C. 209
Fligstein, N. 206
Follesdal, A. 176, 177, 180, 183, 185
Fordism 142
formal democracy 627
and corporatism 6062
former communist countries 1623
Forsyth, M. 192, 193
Foweraker, J. 128
Fox, A. 38
France
rgulation school 35
trade unions 79
Franklin, M. 208
free-market economy 478
From national corporatism to
transnational pluralism 224
Frye, T. 170
functional efficiency 2056
functionalism 2058
functional spillover 206
Gabriel, C. 81
Garay, C. 139, 141
Garretn, M.A. 142, 145
Garrett, G. 39
Geddes, B. 104, 105, 113
gender, and manufacturing employment
56
Genoa Social Forum 812
Germany 16, 187
democracy in xiii
pension reform 2930
social democracy 33
trade unions 22, 534, 58
Giddens, A. 67
gini coefficiency, Central Europe 170
Gleditsch, K. 110
globalization 56, 68
global justice movement 75, 87, 89, 90
forms of action 83, 85, 87
253
heterogeneity 83
labour movement in 812
global movement against neo-liberalism
85
Goldfrank, B. 141, 146
Gold, M. 231
Gorges, M.J. 229, 231
governability 26
governance 334
meaning of 182
Greenwood, J. 230
Grimm, D. 186
Grossman, G.M. 27
Grote, J.R. 52, 237
Gryzmala-Busse, A. 157, 170
Haas, E.B. 206, 207, 209, 211
Hadenius, A. 105
Haesly, R. 208, 214
Haggard, S. 109
Hall, M. 231
Hall, P.A. 36, 40
Haltern, R. 177
Hansen 140
Hassel, A. 24, 26
Hawkins 140
Held, D. 120
Hellman, J. 155, 156, 168, 170
Helpman, E. 27
Hemerijck, A. 57
Herman, V. 229
Herrmann, R. 213
Hibbs, D.A. 54
Higley, J. 104, 105
historical-institutionalism 16, 34
Hix, S. 176, 177, 180, 183, 185, 208,
210
Hoffman, K. 126, 146
Hollingsworth, J.R. 33, 226
Hooghe, L. 208, 209, 211, 213, 214, 215,
217, 218
Hpner, M. 39
How to Democratize the European
Union and Why Bother? xvi
human resource management 32
Hungary 163
Huntington, S. 103
Huntington, S.P. 145
hybrid regimes 161
Hyman, R. 14
254
Index
ideational cohesion 1335

illiberal democracy 161, 167, 169
Imig, D. 208
immigrants 214
import substitution industrialization (ISI)
126, 142
incomes policies 13, 15, 21, 228
Industrialism and Industrial Man 3
industrial relations 38, 73
and corporatism 11
Europe 31
institutionalization 92
Italy 72
and neo-corporatist literature 32
UK 57
United States 5, 6
industry associations 18
inflation 15, 212, 4950
informal bargaining 155
Inglehart, R. 91, 121, 209, 213, 214
insiderism 30
institutional coherence 36
institutionalized democracy 161, 162
interest groups 28, 30, 31, 723, 74
and policy making 231
interest group theory 89, 10
interest heterogeneity, labour unions 134
interest mobilization 73
interest organizations 67
interest politics, and political regimes
230
interest representation 91
intermediation 34
internal coherence 36
internationalization 20, 24
International Monetary Fund (IMF) 154
intitutionalized tripartism 20
Iraq 114
Ireland 30
Italy 61
ATAF 78, 79, 80, 89
COBAS 78, 79, 80, 8990
transport strikes 712, 76, 7881,
8990
trilateral concertation 72
Jackman, R. 103
James, M.J. 92
Japan 17
Jenkins, J. 75
Jenkins, J.C. 93
Joppke, C. 74
Josselin, D. 82
Jowitt, K. 107
Kaplan, A. 18
Karl, T.L. 101, 105, 107, 111, 113, 150,
168, 170
Katzenstein, P.J. 22, 30
Katznelson, I. 121
Katz, R. 140
Kaufman, R.R. 109
Keck, M. 128
Keller, B. 231, 238
Kellogg Institute for International
Studies 245
Kenis, P. 226
Kenworthy, L. 22
Kerr, C. 3
Keynesianism 48, 66, 225
Kitschelt, H. 73, 105, 121, 209
Kittel, B. 50
Klaus, V. 177
Klein, E. 201
Kohler-Koch, B. 31, 224, 230
Kornai, J. 170
Korpi, W. 15
Korzeniewocz, R.P. 128
Kostello, E. 163
Kousis, M. 74
Kraus, P.A. 196
Kriesi, H. 73
Kurtz, M. 142
labour conflicts 85
labour movements 8992
Argentina 143
in global justice movement 812
Latin America 125
labour unions, interest heterogeneity 134
laissez faire 54
Lane, J.-E. 66
Lange, P. 39
Latin America xv, 47, 99, 110, 149, 150
associational relationships with states
and parties 13743
association-party relationships
13941
association-state relationships 1389
Index
civil society 128
collective action 12931
democratization and popular interest
regime 11948
emerging interest regime 1279, 144
employment 1267
ideational cohesion 1335
informal workers 129
labour-based political party (LBP)
121, 122, 127
labour movements in 125
labour-unions 121, 122, 127, 132,
133
lower-class representation 120
macro policy 1413
mode of democratic transition 1226
new economic model 1267
organizational resources 1323
pacts 170
popular associations 122, 1278, 129,
132, 145
popular interest regime 121
sociopolitical matrix 142
subnational policy-making 141
transition from military rule 123,
1256
union-LBP hub 123, 126, 127, 140,
142
Leadbeater, C. 68
Leff, C.S. 113
left wing 10
legitimacy 185
Lehmbruch, G. 38, 46, 73, 226, 237
Leibfried, S. 197, 212
Leicht, K. 75
Levi, M. 81
Levitsky, S. 126, 141
liberal democracy 196
liberalization 102, 16062
liberalized autocracy 161
limited authoritarian capitalism 167
limited democracy 167
limited political democracy 161
Lindberg, L.N. 208
Lindblom, C.E. 7, 129
Linz, J.J. 105, 113
Lipietz, A. 142
Lipset, S.M. 6, 103, 105, 209
Lipsky, M. 72
lobbies/lobbying 31, 234
255
corporations as lobbyists 65
and democracy 635
role of individual firms 65
Lodge, J. 229
Lord, C. 177, 183, 189
Lowenthal, A. 100, 108
Lowi, T.J. 136
Luckham, R. 113
Luong, P.J. 157, 170
Maastricht Treaty 188, 217, 231, 234
McAdam, D. 83, 208
McDermott, G.A. 154
Macdonald, L. 81
McFaul, M. 169
McLaren, L.M. 208, 213
McNally, D. 77
Mahoney, J. 105
Maine, H.S. 192
Mainwaring, S. 111
Mair, P. 121, 140, 145, 209
Majone, G. 176
Manchin, R. 163
Manin, B. 144
manufacturing base, shift away from
556
manufacturing employment, and gender
56
Marin, B. 34
market economy 35, 156
Marks, G. 208, 209, 211, 213, 214, 215,
218, 220
Marsh, M. 208
mass production and mass consumption
66
Matzner, E. 48
Mayer, F.C. 177
Mayntz, R. 33, 34, 40
Mazey, S.P. 31, 208
Mbaye, H. 208
Melucci, A. 91
Mexico 124, 127, 140
Michels, R. 14
middle class 91
military regimes, Latin America
1256
Mill, J.S. 193
misery index 15
Mitrany, D. 206, 212, 216
modernization 4, 8
256
modes of transition 111
imposed 111
Latin America 1226
pacted 111
reformist 111
revolutionary 111
Molina, O. 38
Moncloa Accords 113
monetarism 19
monetarist unilateralism 22
Monetary Union 24
Monet method 215
Moody, K. 79, 81
Moore, B. 103
Moravcsik, A. 21, 176, 206
Mouriaux, R. 79
multi-level governance, and
politicization 21618
multiple functional regimes 215
Munck, G.L. 105, 113
Myrdal, H-G. 59, 65
myth of moderation 125
NAFTA 81, 90
national identity 21215, 217
national incomes policies, and neocorporatism 1516
national social pacts 245
nation states
democratic xiii
shift away from 512
Nee, V. 163
negative externalities 176
neo-classical theory 16, 27
neo-corporatism xv, 712, 13
absence of normative theory 28
as a class compromise 14
as a core concept of social science
19
decision making 73
and democracy 4670
failure in UK 36
international level 23
literature and industrial relations 32
as a male institution 56
and national incomes policies 1516
spread of 14
neo-corporatist bargaining 50
neo-corporatist industrial relations
institutions 4955
Index
neo-corporatist institutions, and sectoral
changes in employment 5560
neo-corporatist systems, insider-serving
60
neo-functionalism 205, 207, 2089, 215,
216
neo-liberalism 2631, 126, 142, 143
Netherlands 57
network governance 224
networks 40, 823
new economic model, Latin America
1267
new social movements (NSM) 28, 72, 91
Niedermayer, O. 208
Nissen, S. 188, 189
Nollert, M. 73
non-convergence theory 37
Norris, P. 89
Nye, J.S. 208
Obradovich, D. 238
ODonnell, G. 99, 101, 103, 105, 107,
111, 119, 120, 123, 125, 150, 156,
159, 160, 161, 162, 167
Offe, C. 105, 113, 129, 133, 211
oil effect 104
oligarchic democracy 167, 168
oligarchy 144, 156
OLoughlin, J. 105, 110
Olsen, J.P. 208
Olson, D. 81
Olson, M. 27, 35, 49, 54, 129
Orenstein, M. 154
organizational challenges 129
organizational resources 1323
organized collectivism 30
pacted transitions 113
pacts 123
Latin America 170
monopolization of 234
survivability pacts 168, 171
Panitch, L. 14, 20
parental leave agreement 232, 233, 235
Pareto authoritarianism 185
Pareto Optimality 198
parliamentary democracy 62
partial regimes 112, 119, 120, 144, 155,
226
path dependency 37
Index
Peattie, L. 135
Pempel, T.J. 17
Pentland, C. 206
Prez-Lin, A. 111
permissive consensus 208
Persson, T. 27
Peru 124, 125
Peruzzotti, E. 145
Pianta, M. 81
Pierson, P. 212, 237
Piven, F.F. 77
Pizzorno, A. 14, 15, 52, 60, 91
Platzer, H.-W. 230
pluralism 224, 237
pluralist democracy 7, 8
pluralist industrialism 4
Pochet, P. 24, 50, 52
Poland 163
policy making, and interest groups 231
policy networks 34, 226
ideal types 228
political change, patterns of 157
political conflict, structure of 20815
political democracy 161
weaknesses 63
political economy, historical
institutionalist research on 34
political involvement 66
political liberalization 16062
definition of 160
political regimes, and interest politics
230
political transitions 159
politicization 206, 207, 215
in the European Union 208
and multi-level governance 21618
Pollack, M. 206, 210
polyarchy 161
Porter, M.E. 30
Portes, A. 126, 146
post-communist developments 15051,
170
post-materialist values 91
post-national collective agency 199
precondition literature 151, 1537
Preuss, U.K. 113
price constraint 48
Pridham, G. 110
principal-agent theory 206
principle of toleration 195
257
private interest governments 18, 33, 34

privatization, former communist
countries 163
procedural minima conception,
democracy 119, 120
procedural minimum, elections 161
production 35
property rights 109, 149, 152, 153,
15960, 162, 163, 164, 1658,
169
Soviet Union 163
protest 73, 745, 80, 85, 89, 92
against WTO in Seattle 77, 81, 82
hunger strikes 85
marches 92
road blocks 85
Przeworski, A. 104, 109, 112
public bads 178
public debt 19
public interests 164
public regulation 1635, 1645
public sector workers, and trade unions
57
Rachel, G. 38
rational choice 16
rational intentional design 113
regime change 102, 107
devices for 111
regime shopping 210
regime transformation 150
regime transitions 102
and regime consolidation 104
Regini, M. 25, 27, 72
regional integration 205, 2067, 216,
217
regulation, changes in 1645
regulative minimum 165
regulative state 164
rent-seeking 49, 54
revolutionary transformation 150
Rhodes, M. 25, 30, 38, 50
Richardson, J.J. 31, 208, 224
Riesenberg, P. 201
Rifflet, R. 228
Risse, T. 213
Roberts, K. 127, 146
Roever, S. 132
Rogers, J. 31
Rokkan, S. 11, 209
258
Index
Roland, G. 154
Romania 155
Rose, R. 107
Ross, M. 105
Rostow, W.W. 3
Rucht, D. 85, 92
Rueshemeyer, D. 149
Rusciano, M. 76
Russia 155, 156
Rustow, D. 101, 106
Sabel, C. 31
Sachs, J.D. 15
Sako, M. 50
sanctions 129
Sandholtz, W. 206
Santoro Passarelli, G. 76
Sbragia, A. 212
Scharpf, F.W. 22, 33, 56, 181, 210, 211
Scheingold, S.A. 208
Schmidt, V.A. 56, 224
Schmitt, C. 193
Schmitter, P.C. xiii, xiv, xvi, 8, 18, 23,
33, 46, 47, 52, 73, 99, 101, 102,
103, 105, 106, 108, 111, 119, 120,
123, 125, 150, 155, 156, 159, 160,
161, 162, 167, 177, 179, 185, 190,
191, 205, 206, 207, 208, 224, 225,
226, 228, 229, 230, 231, 238
and Brazil 243
work of 2436
Schneider, A. 141
Schneider, C.Q. xiii, 106, 108, 155, 160,
161, 162
Schneider, V. 226
Sczerbiak, A. 216
secondary actions 77
sectoral associations 209
self-government 18
self-regulation 165
service sector 56, 57, 67
sex discrimination 232
sexual harassment 232
Shadlen, K. 129
Shin, D.C. 105, 107
Sikkink, K. 128
Silva, F. 81
Silver, B.J. 75, 129
Single Market 175, 1867
Sinnot, R. 208
Sisk, T. 113
skills 50, 56
Sklar, R. 112
Slater, D. 167, 170
Smith, W.C. 128
Smitter, P. 208
Smulovitz, C. 145
snake 31
Snyder, R. 105
Social Action Programme 229
social cohesion 9
social demands 73
social democracy/Social Democratic
party 10, 29, 161, 211
Germany 14, 33
social dialogue 23
social groups, collective organization 10
socialist mixed economy 163
socialist movement 121
social movements 72, 105
institutionalization of 74
new social movements (NSM) 28, 72,
91
social movement unions 75
social pacts, shift to 524
social partners 11, 228, 229
and social policy legislation 2313,
234, 235, 236
social policy 23035
social regulation 212
social rights 91
social science
conceptual innovations 12
and corporatist debate 31
societal corporatism 47
societal guidance 40
Srries, B. 231
Soskice, D. 36
South, democratization of 154
South Africa 113
sovereign states, relationships between
192
sovereignty 120
EU members loss of 18081
Spain 589, 79
Spanish model 113
Stark, D. 151, 154, 169
state, social and economic rule 159
state formation 9
stateness 107, 108
Index
state redistribution 159
statist pluralism 224
stato/federato 191, 216
status contract 1923
status treaty 201
Steenbergen, M. 208
Stepan, A. 113
Stephens, E.H. 149
Stephens, J.D. 149
Steuerung (governance) concept of 33,
34
Stiglitz, J. 154, 155, 156, 168
Still the Century of Corporatism 89
stock exchanges 66
Stone Sweet, A. 206
Strth, B. 214
strategic specialization 36
Streeck, W. 18, 22, 23, 33, 35, 40, 48,
50, 129, 167, 208, 224, 226, 228,
229, 231
strikes 778, 85
Italy 712, 76, 7881, 8990
structural adjustment 30
structural functionalism 6
subsidiarity 190
supranational governance theory 206
supranationalism 210, 212, 216
Sweden 211
Swenson, P.A. 39
Szelenyi, I. 163, 168
Tabellini, G.E. 27
Taggart, P. 214, 216
Tait, V. 75
Tarrow, S. 83, 105, 208
technocratic view, European Union
1756
Teorell, J. 105
Thatcherism 21
Thelen, K. 40, 237
Thompson, E.P. 121
Tilly, Charles 72, 83, 215
Tilly, Chris 75
Tobin tax 82
Tocqueville, A. de 109, 193, 201
Torreblanca, J.I. 238
Touraine, A. 91
Townsley, E. 168
trade cycle 48
trade unions 6, 10, 11, 1213, 19, 25,
489
259
collapse of power 54
critical unions 89
decline 15, 20, 32
encompassingness 65
Europe 5
and female employees 57
France 79
in a free-market economy 478
Germany 22, 53, 58
Latin America 12021
and mobilization of social groups
734
organizational structure 78
and public sector workers 57
and tripartite economic concertation
14
Trampusch, C. 29
transactionalist theory of supranational
governance 206
transition 119, 15860
and consolidation xvi
definition of 101
democratization and economic
transformation 166
from authoritarian rule 1223
and geographical location 11011
mode of democratic transition, Latin
America 1226
modes of 111
political 159
Transitions from Authoritarian Rule
99103, 245, 246
transitology 100, 103, 105, 114, 246
Traxler, F. 25, 50, 230
Treaty of the Constitution of Europe
(TCE) 186
Treaty of Rome 188, 200201
Triandafyllidou, A. 214
Trigilia, C. 16
trilateral concertation, Italy 72
tripartism 24
Eastern Europe 40
tripartite conferences 229
tripartite polity 228
Tsunekawa, K. 1718
UK
business associations 65
failure of neo-corporatism 36
260
Ukraine 155, 156
unemployment 13, 15, 21, 23, 28,
48
UNICE 231, 232, 2334
union (between states) 193
United States, industrial relations 5, 6,
38
The Uniting of Europe 206, 209
universal suffrage 62
Uruguay 124, 125, 126
Vakaloulis, M. 79
Valiente, C. 74
van der Eijk, C. 208
van de Walle, N. 107
Vanhercke, B. 52
Van Kersbergen, K. 214
Venezuela 113, 140, 145
Verba, S. 103
Vietnam 163
Visser, J. 40, 56, 57, 233, 238
Voelzkow, H. 230
Index
wages 13, 40
Wallace, M. 93
Weiler, J.H.H. 177, 195
welfare democracy 161
welfare state 91
Wessels, B. 208
Whitefield, S. 209
Whitehead, L. 99, 105, 110
Wiesenthal, H. 17, 129, 133
Williamson, O.E. 33
Wilson, C. 209, 214
Wilson Center 2445
Wilson, F.L. 93
Woll, C. 40
womens groups 74
Wood, E. 105
working class 15, 39, 667
works councils 231
Wright, E.O. 129
Zolberg, A.R. 121
Zrn, M. 197

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The Diversity of Democracy

Colin Crouch and Wolfgang Streeck 2006

ISBN-13: 978 1 84542 613 2 (hardcover)

PART I CORPORATISM AND DEMOCRACY

The study of organized interests: before The Century and after

PART II DEMOCRATIC TRANSITIONS AND CONSOLIDATION

From democracy to democratization: before and after

PART III DEMOCRACY AND EUROPEAN INTEGRATION

The problem of legitimacy in the European polity: is

Collective participation in the European Union: the Euro

List of tables and figures

Present and past participation of ESF activists (% yes)

Transitions: democratization and economic transformation

at Trinity College, Oxford, and Professor of Sociology at the University of

European Public Policy, Journal of Common Market Studies, and West

Contemporary Capitalism (co-edited with Herbert Kitschelt, Peter Lange and

Krieg, Verbrechen, Blasphemie: ber den Wandel bewaffneter Gewalt (2002;

particular democracy in the making, the possibility of democracy in its real

pro-democratic movements have gained momentum in various parts of the

Corporatism and democracy

1. The study of organized interests:

Corporatism and democracy

The study of organized interests: before the century and after

that restored agency to societies, allowed for continuing ideological conflict

Corporatism and democracy

The study of organized interests: before the century and after

Corporatism and democracy

observations that before were treated as insignificant anomalies, or errors of

The study of organized interests: before the century and after

settled that question by proposing an ambitious conceptual framework for the

Corporatism and democracy

The study of organized interests: before the century and after

Corporatism and democracy

Summing up, what made Schmitters early work so exciting, first to

THE CORPORATIST GROWTH INDUSTRY

The impact of conceptual innovations in the social sciences depends, much

The study of organized interests: before the century and after

accrued to them from a type of political intervention in the economy which

Corporatism and democracy

In its course neo-corporatism was discovered just about everywhere, and

The study of organized interests: before the century and after

something like the standard method of advanced research in political science

Corporatism and democracy

and political sociology of the role of neo-corporatism in successful national

The study of organized interests: before the century and after

Corporatism and democracy

Tsunekawa 1979). Another version was industry associations, for example of

The study of organized interests: before the century and after

THE BURSTING OF THE BUBBLE

Corporatism and democracy

able to maintain a sufficiently high level of membership and organizational

The study of organized interests: before the century and after

Corporatism and democracy

politically independent, central bank of the whole of Western Europe.

The study of organized interests: before the century and after

Corporatism and democracy

The study of organized interests: before the century and after

Corporatism and democracy

collective organizations with respect to participation in concertation and